See you Wednesday,
Becky
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Within the Jewish imagination, monsters like dybbuks and golems represent cultural fantasies. The basic plot of the Jewish monster story goes like this: The monster arrives to a community, makes the community believe that the Messiah has arrived, and then destroys the community's hope that they will ever be saved. In Cynthia Ozick's The Puttermesser Papers, Ruth metaphorically births the golem Xanthippe, who in turn brings peace to New York City and then destroys it with her ferocious appetite for sex. Similarly, Leah leaves her family and community behind to enter the Holy Land with Khonon in S. Ansky's play The Dybbuk. Though the names are different, the stories remain the same: in both texts, sexuality is a key component to the downfall of the characters. More specifically, feminine sexuality is construed as monstrous. The monsters of these texts seem to be a metaphor for something surrounding sexuality, although the metaphor is a bit unclear. Are the purpose of these monsters to create a sense of fear about feminine sexuality? And if so, is this because sexuality is portrayed as a source of profound power? Or, is sexuality really monstrous because lust is a sin, and are these characters experiencing trials and tribulations because they cannot control themselves? If this is the case, what exactly do the Jews have to fear?
Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser is a quietly powerful woman. She is well-educated, well-read, and thinks highly of herself. She is good at her job at the Department of Receipts and Disbursements; however, her bosses do not intend on ever giving her the raise she deserves. But even though Ruth is better than her working conditions, she opts to stay: "The difficulty with Puttermesser is that she is loyal to certain environments" (Ozick 12). Though Ruth does not outrightly state that she is unhappy with her life, it can be assumed that -- because she is so well-educated -- she knows she is overworked and underappreciated. Her complacency in the face of her work environment leads one to believe that Ruth has low self-worth. It seems odd that someone with her intelligence and talents does not strive for something greater than a job that involves little more than a lot of paper-pushing. The fact that she stays at her job shows that Ruth defines herself through her intelligence and her work identity. This is made especially clear when she writes a letter to Mayor Mavett about her demotion (Ozick 33-34). She sees this demotion as an enormous insult because she takes her job much more seriously than any of her coworkers. The loss of Ruth's title signifies a loss of control over her own life.
Without her work identity, the only way she defines herself is by her intelligence, specifically, by the books she reads. Ruth constantly reads, describing her Eden as a place where she can sit under a tree, eat chocolates, and read library books without the burden of overdue fines (Ozick 13-14). Reading for Ruth is a personal act that she does not share with many people, and with good reason. When she does share her love of literature, she is mocked and misunderstood, as seen when Rappoport leaves Ruth in the middle of the night after she refuses to put down Theaetetus (Ozick 24). Reading essentially gives Ruth a purpose in life, so when others cannot seem to understand why she loves it, it devalues her sense of identity. This makes Ruth seem weak: her sense of self exists in fiction where it cannot be understood or appreciated by the important people in her life.
In this way, Ruth has no agency or control over her life. She halfheartedly attempts to gain some control by vowing to grow plants in her apartment; she has an almost desperate need to be "responsible for life" and get rid of her self-proclaimed "black thumb" (Ozick 26). Instead of taking control of her own life, she invests all her energy into her plants. This is perhaps because she is afraid to revitalize her own life, which corresponds with the notion that she has no agency.
Ultimately, though, her apartment's plants do not give her a sense of purpose. Though Ruth attempts to defy Jewish woman stereotypes by never marrying and working for a higher education, she cannot come to terms with the fact that she is childless: "Sometimes the thought that she would never give birth tore her heart" (Ozick 36). This sentence is positioned in between two paragraphs about her job, showing how determined Ruth is to avoid feeling unaccomplished and lonely. Her refusal to reveal her vulnerability shows how image-conscious she is; Ruth does not want to seem like a failure.
In many ways, Ruth's childlessness desexualizes and shames her. It advertises an image of Ruth as a spinster, and within the Jewish culture, this image is somewhat ignominious. Indeed, Ruth's refusal to reconcile her childlessness shows that she, at least on some level, realizes this. Perhaps this sense of shame associated with her failure to marry and reproduce is what causes Ruth's lack of agency in the first place. This implies again that Ruth has low self-worth, which is somewhat ironic considering Ruth shows that, by staying single and working at a law office, she fights hard to defy the stereotypes set against her by her Jewish community. Regardless of her accomplishments, though, Ruth is a minority; her possibilities to reach for more are limited. This means that she cannot balance her current life with a husband and a child. For Ruth, life with a child exists only as a fantasy.
When Ruth creates Xanthippe, she creates an agent of change. It is no coincidence that Ruth uses the dirt from her potted plants to shape Xanthippe; when the plants do not provide Ruth with a sense of control, they are traded in for something of an upgrade. Unlike the plants, Xanthippe's body acts like a vessel for Ruth's hopes and dreams. Simply, Xanthippe represents Ruth's agency. She is more than just a manifestation of Ruth's desires to have a child; Ruth's imagined offspring is a "self-lov[ing]" version of herself as a child (Ozick 36). When Ruth looks at Xanthippe, she only sees an ugly, obtrusive, irritating "thief of the earth" (Ozick 40), which is the antithesis of Ruth wants her child to be. One may deduce, however, that Xanthippe is the true image Ruth has of herself. Ruth asserts earlier that she "believe[s] in the uses of fantasy: 'A person should see himself or herself everywhere. All things manifest us'" (Ozick 36). With this notion in mind, Ruth implies that she made Xanthippe as a reflection of herself. This corresponds with the idea that Ruth secretly has a low opinion of herself. At the same time, Xanthippe is a hopeful message that says Ruth knows she is capable of changing her life.
Xanthippe is Ruth's agent of force, power, and fantasy. She takes Ruth's dreams of running for mayor and turns them into reality (Ozick 70), thus earning Ruth the respect she always deserved. Unfortunately for Ruth, all good things eventually come to an end. The downfall of her golem, Ruth believes, happens when Xanthippe realizes her appetite for sex. When Xanthippe stops paying attention to Ruth's politics and instead starts sleeping with Rappoport, the Eden that she helped Ruth create starts to revert back to its old ways: the crime rate returns, the Department of Sanitation stops cleaning the streets, and the general collective unhappiness of New York City's citizens returns (Ozick 86). This city-wide relapse represents Ruth losing control over her agent of power. The difference between Ruth's former and present life is that her new position of power causes the whole city to suffer; before winning office, Ruth's lack of agency was a personal problem. Because of the golem, Ruth's private plights become public affairs. Her struggles to control Xanthippe affect the entire city, which in many ways hurts the community more than if she had never been in office at all. Ruth shows New York's citizens what their community would look like as a utopia, only to almost immediately destroy it and ruin any hope the community had of living in a harmonic haven. Her stint in office is basically a grand scale version of tempting a small child with candy and then eating it in front of his face: the child is worse off than he would have been if he had never been shown the candy at all. Ruth blames Xanthippe and implies that Xanthippe caused this destruction and disappointment within the community, but ultimately Ruth is at fault because she cannot control her agency.
In a sense, though, perhaps Ruth fails to control Xanthippe because she has no real grounds to act upon. She claims that Xanthippe loses focus when she starts sleeping around. However, before Xanthippe's sexuality blossoms, Ruth says that Xanthippe spends her days milling around the city and returns to the mayor's mansion with relatively prosaic ideas to improve the community (Ozick 78). Ruth only starts to resent Xanthippe's uselessness when Xanthippe starts having sex. This shows that the real reason Ruth attempts to punish Xanthippe is because she is afraid of the power Xanthippe will discover once she begins to understand her sexuality. Ruth's horrified reaction to her golem's sex life perhaps parallels the Jewish community's reaction to Ruth's lifestyle choices. Just like Xanthippe, Ruth steps outside the boundaries set by her community to make something new and unexpected of herself. With Ruth's character, this effort is construed as noble and gallant. It makes her Jewish community look oppressive for setting boundaries in the first place. But when Xanthippe acts in the same fashion, Ruth reprimands her. Ruth, then, goes from being the oppressed to the oppressor. This shift shows that Ruth cannot fully escape from the boundaries within the Jewish community. She retains this mentality that women are supposed to act a certain way; by wanting Xanthippe to fulfill this stereotype, she takes two steps backwards as a liberated Jewish woman.
This brings into question if one can ever really leave their community. It seems that if one does opt to leave, mass destruction is eminent: the downfall of New York stands as a motif of punishment for escaping. Ruth's failure to mayor New York City shows that attempting to shake the foundation of a community is ultimately detrimental. In essence, Ruth betrays her Jewish community, so why should she be allowed to successfully forge a new life in New York? The golem is not the source of Ruth's problems. Rather, Ruth's golem is a manifestation of the monster that lives inside Ruth's consciousness. The monstrousness of the golem represents the part of Ruth that thought it was acceptable to leave her Jewish community behind.
On the other side of the coin, it is wildly unfair and unrealistic to expect one's identity to exist strictly within one community. Ansky explores these ideas in The Dybbuk with Leah and Khonon's star-crossed romance. The subtitle of this play is "Between Two Worlds," which very accurately defines Leah and Khonon's relationship. The conflict in this play begins when Sender does not allow his daughter to take Khonon's hand in marriage; Sender wants Leah to be married off to a rich man (Ansky 17). Sender's wish presents Khonon with an impossible obstacle to overcome -- he will never make enough money to satisfy Sender -- but Khonon thinks he can get over his feelings by immersing himself in Kabbalah: "Which sin is the hardest to conquer? The sin of lust for a woman..." (Ansky 14). Khonon delves deep into his Jewish identity to find the answers to his problems, which is ironic and arguably unproductive because the standards of his Jewish community created his problems in the first place.
In a way, though, Khonon's study of Kabbalah provides him a form of escape. He calls the Talmud "cold and dry" and then "speaks with animation" about his love of Kabbalah (Ansky 12). According to Khonon, there is "another world" that waits to be discovered. On the surface, he appears to be talking about his spirituality. A deeper reading, however, shows that his intentions are to leave his current world completely. In his present state, Khonon is unhappy. Concurrently, his Jewish peers live by the Talmud. Khonon's need to move beyond the Talmud shows that he already exists on a plane separate from his community. By expressing a keen interest in Kabbalah, Khonon principally leaves his Jewish community at the very beginning of the play.
Regardless of this, Khonon still tries to maintain a good relationship within his milieu of Jews. Even in his rant against the Talmud, he remembers to stay diplomatic: he calls it "profound" and "sublime"; its only problem is that it "shackles you to the earth" (Ansky 13). Assuming the Talmud represents Khonon's community, this statement means Khonon loves and appreciates his community but wants to move beyond it. Like Ruth, Khonon's possibilities are limited within his Jewish sphere. Technically, Kabbalah is an extension of this sphere, but it "tears the soul from its earthly bonds" (Ansky 13). If it exists outside the earth, it therefore exists outside Khonon's current Jewish world.
When Khonon's spirit enters Leah's body, he literally does remove himself from his "earthly bonds." Although this move is huge and bold, it is not exactly a complete move out of his community. Leah is still very much immersed in her Jewish identity as it exists within the community, so even though his body is liberated, Khonon enters a new body that is just as "shackled." In this way, his spirit is not completely free from the confines of his community. Though Khonon never gives an explanation for this move, one can assume that he chooses to enter Leah's body because he is in love with her. While this is, on some level, very romantic, it is also very invasive and highly presumptuous to assume that Leah would appreciate Khonon taking up residence inside of her. His actions are a metaphor for rape, which forces the audience to question Khonon's spiritual and personal integrity. In turn, the audience must question Khonon's decision to leave his community. If he must rape the woman he loves in order to release his shackles, then the end does not justify the means.
In order to understand Khonon's motives, his feelings about Kabbalah must be examined through a Freudian lens. When he discusses Kabbalah with Henekh, the stage directions show that Khonon's excitement slowly builds. He becomes "suddenly alert" and then "animated," (Ansky 12), showing that his interest piques when someone mentions Kabbalah. When Khonon finally addresses Kabbalah directly, he speaks "ecstatically" and his lines are punctuated with exclamation points. Then, he suddenly "falls" and says his "strength...fail[s]" him (Ansky 13). In short, this scene seems to show Khonon experience a spiritual orgasm.
This sexualizes Khonon's relationship to Kabbalah, but this does not make him blasphemous or impure. Rather, this reading connects the importance of asserting sexuality within spirituality. When Khonon relates the most profound level of Judaism to an orgasm, it implies that there is huge power in sexuality. Within the Jewish culture, there is a stigma against people who act on their sexual feelings. Ruth's treatment of Xanthippe and Khonon's notion of lust as the worst sin are prime examples of how sexual perceptions within the Jewish culture are, put simply, bad. Khonon's understanding of Kabbalah shows that there is a need to explore the connection between the physical and the spiritual. Khonon's spiritual rape of Leah, then, frees Leah from her similar "earthly bonds" (namely, her arranged marriage) and allows her to discover a whole new realm of her Judaism.
Ruth never reaches the spiritual nirvana that Khonon and Leah find together at the end of their play. This may be because she never comes to terms with her sexual agency. Khonon uses Leah's body to carry them into the Holy Land. In essence, Leah's body is a container for agency. Xanthippe's body serves a similar function: it holds Ruth's political power and sexual fantasy. These similarities shows the importance of the female body in relation to power and agency. Arguably, women are the oldest group of oppressed minorities, so perhaps feminine power derives from their experience living within the margin. Additionally, the Jews are also pushed into the margin, so Jewish women can be seen as a double minority. Power within the margins often stems from the oppressed people's anger. In this vein, it makes sense that the Jewish female body is the most powerful agent in these two texts.
On a superficial level, the destruction of New York City in The Puttermesser Papers looks like a result of the golem's sexual appetite. But by considering the city in relation to Leah's body as a vessel, it becomes clear that peace in New York ends because Ruth does not come to terms with her own sexual appetite. Ruth has no agency because she refuses to let sex permeate her life. Judging by her treatment of Xanthippe, Ruth seems to be afraid of sex. This further shows that Ruth is afraid of her own potential power. It also shows that she is not completely comfortable with her identity as a woman. Unfortunately for Ruth, she cannot take control of her life until she learns to use her sexuality as an agent. Her golem tries to show her the way, but Ruth resists. As a result, her life collapses; she cannot redefine herself outside her Jewish community. Leah and Khonon's move to the Holy Land shows that the only way to completely remove oneself from one's community is to explore one's sexual identity.
Feminine sexuality is accused of being monstrous in these texts because it is a form of escapism and an agent of change. When sexuality is explored within the Jewish community, it disrupts the balance of power. The Jews associate female sexuality with shame and guilt in order to police the boundaries of their community. That way, the community members will not discover their complete identities and thus decide to leave. The Jews believe that their community should wait for the Messiah together, but when people start exploring identities outside of their Jewish one, they discover their own forms of exile. As a minority group, the Jews need to keep as many of their people as possible in order to retain any sort of leverage over the hegemony. However, by denying the existence of sexuality in their culture, they dig themselves deeper into oppression.
Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser is a quietly powerful woman. She is well-educated, well-read, and thinks highly of herself. She is good at her job at the Department of Receipts and Disbursements; however, her bosses do not intend on ever giving her the raise she deserves. But even though Ruth is better than her working conditions, she opts to stay: "The difficulty with Puttermesser is that she is loyal to certain environments" (Ozick 12). Though Ruth does not outrightly state that she is unhappy with her life, it can be assumed that -- because she is so well-educated -- she knows she is overworked and underappreciated. Her complacency in the face of her work environment leads one to believe that Ruth has low self-worth. It seems odd that someone with her intelligence and talents does not strive for something greater than a job that involves little more than a lot of paper-pushing. The fact that she stays at her job shows that Ruth defines herself through her intelligence and her work identity. This is made especially clear when she writes a letter to Mayor Mavett about her demotion (Ozick 33-34). She sees this demotion as an enormous insult because she takes her job much more seriously than any of her coworkers. The loss of Ruth's title signifies a loss of control over her own life.
Without her work identity, the only way she defines herself is by her intelligence, specifically, by the books she reads. Ruth constantly reads, describing her Eden as a place where she can sit under a tree, eat chocolates, and read library books without the burden of overdue fines (Ozick 13-14). Reading for Ruth is a personal act that she does not share with many people, and with good reason. When she does share her love of literature, she is mocked and misunderstood, as seen when Rappoport leaves Ruth in the middle of the night after she refuses to put down Theaetetus (Ozick 24). Reading essentially gives Ruth a purpose in life, so when others cannot seem to understand why she loves it, it devalues her sense of identity. This makes Ruth seem weak: her sense of self exists in fiction where it cannot be understood or appreciated by the important people in her life.
In this way, Ruth has no agency or control over her life. She halfheartedly attempts to gain some control by vowing to grow plants in her apartment; she has an almost desperate need to be "responsible for life" and get rid of her self-proclaimed "black thumb" (Ozick 26). Instead of taking control of her own life, she invests all her energy into her plants. This is perhaps because she is afraid to revitalize her own life, which corresponds with the notion that she has no agency.
Ultimately, though, her apartment's plants do not give her a sense of purpose. Though Ruth attempts to defy Jewish woman stereotypes by never marrying and working for a higher education, she cannot come to terms with the fact that she is childless: "Sometimes the thought that she would never give birth tore her heart" (Ozick 36). This sentence is positioned in between two paragraphs about her job, showing how determined Ruth is to avoid feeling unaccomplished and lonely. Her refusal to reveal her vulnerability shows how image-conscious she is; Ruth does not want to seem like a failure.
In many ways, Ruth's childlessness desexualizes and shames her. It advertises an image of Ruth as a spinster, and within the Jewish culture, this image is somewhat ignominious. Indeed, Ruth's refusal to reconcile her childlessness shows that she, at least on some level, realizes this. Perhaps this sense of shame associated with her failure to marry and reproduce is what causes Ruth's lack of agency in the first place. This implies again that Ruth has low self-worth, which is somewhat ironic considering Ruth shows that, by staying single and working at a law office, she fights hard to defy the stereotypes set against her by her Jewish community. Regardless of her accomplishments, though, Ruth is a minority; her possibilities to reach for more are limited. This means that she cannot balance her current life with a husband and a child. For Ruth, life with a child exists only as a fantasy.
When Ruth creates Xanthippe, she creates an agent of change. It is no coincidence that Ruth uses the dirt from her potted plants to shape Xanthippe; when the plants do not provide Ruth with a sense of control, they are traded in for something of an upgrade. Unlike the plants, Xanthippe's body acts like a vessel for Ruth's hopes and dreams. Simply, Xanthippe represents Ruth's agency. She is more than just a manifestation of Ruth's desires to have a child; Ruth's imagined offspring is a "self-lov[ing]" version of herself as a child (Ozick 36). When Ruth looks at Xanthippe, she only sees an ugly, obtrusive, irritating "thief of the earth" (Ozick 40), which is the antithesis of Ruth wants her child to be. One may deduce, however, that Xanthippe is the true image Ruth has of herself. Ruth asserts earlier that she "believe[s] in the uses of fantasy: 'A person should see himself or herself everywhere. All things manifest us'" (Ozick 36). With this notion in mind, Ruth implies that she made Xanthippe as a reflection of herself. This corresponds with the idea that Ruth secretly has a low opinion of herself. At the same time, Xanthippe is a hopeful message that says Ruth knows she is capable of changing her life.
Xanthippe is Ruth's agent of force, power, and fantasy. She takes Ruth's dreams of running for mayor and turns them into reality (Ozick 70), thus earning Ruth the respect she always deserved. Unfortunately for Ruth, all good things eventually come to an end. The downfall of her golem, Ruth believes, happens when Xanthippe realizes her appetite for sex. When Xanthippe stops paying attention to Ruth's politics and instead starts sleeping with Rappoport, the Eden that she helped Ruth create starts to revert back to its old ways: the crime rate returns, the Department of Sanitation stops cleaning the streets, and the general collective unhappiness of New York City's citizens returns (Ozick 86). This city-wide relapse represents Ruth losing control over her agent of power. The difference between Ruth's former and present life is that her new position of power causes the whole city to suffer; before winning office, Ruth's lack of agency was a personal problem. Because of the golem, Ruth's private plights become public affairs. Her struggles to control Xanthippe affect the entire city, which in many ways hurts the community more than if she had never been in office at all. Ruth shows New York's citizens what their community would look like as a utopia, only to almost immediately destroy it and ruin any hope the community had of living in a harmonic haven. Her stint in office is basically a grand scale version of tempting a small child with candy and then eating it in front of his face: the child is worse off than he would have been if he had never been shown the candy at all. Ruth blames Xanthippe and implies that Xanthippe caused this destruction and disappointment within the community, but ultimately Ruth is at fault because she cannot control her agency.
In a sense, though, perhaps Ruth fails to control Xanthippe because she has no real grounds to act upon. She claims that Xanthippe loses focus when she starts sleeping around. However, before Xanthippe's sexuality blossoms, Ruth says that Xanthippe spends her days milling around the city and returns to the mayor's mansion with relatively prosaic ideas to improve the community (Ozick 78). Ruth only starts to resent Xanthippe's uselessness when Xanthippe starts having sex. This shows that the real reason Ruth attempts to punish Xanthippe is because she is afraid of the power Xanthippe will discover once she begins to understand her sexuality. Ruth's horrified reaction to her golem's sex life perhaps parallels the Jewish community's reaction to Ruth's lifestyle choices. Just like Xanthippe, Ruth steps outside the boundaries set by her community to make something new and unexpected of herself. With Ruth's character, this effort is construed as noble and gallant. It makes her Jewish community look oppressive for setting boundaries in the first place. But when Xanthippe acts in the same fashion, Ruth reprimands her. Ruth, then, goes from being the oppressed to the oppressor. This shift shows that Ruth cannot fully escape from the boundaries within the Jewish community. She retains this mentality that women are supposed to act a certain way; by wanting Xanthippe to fulfill this stereotype, she takes two steps backwards as a liberated Jewish woman.
This brings into question if one can ever really leave their community. It seems that if one does opt to leave, mass destruction is eminent: the downfall of New York stands as a motif of punishment for escaping. Ruth's failure to mayor New York City shows that attempting to shake the foundation of a community is ultimately detrimental. In essence, Ruth betrays her Jewish community, so why should she be allowed to successfully forge a new life in New York? The golem is not the source of Ruth's problems. Rather, Ruth's golem is a manifestation of the monster that lives inside Ruth's consciousness. The monstrousness of the golem represents the part of Ruth that thought it was acceptable to leave her Jewish community behind.
On the other side of the coin, it is wildly unfair and unrealistic to expect one's identity to exist strictly within one community. Ansky explores these ideas in The Dybbuk with Leah and Khonon's star-crossed romance. The subtitle of this play is "Between Two Worlds," which very accurately defines Leah and Khonon's relationship. The conflict in this play begins when Sender does not allow his daughter to take Khonon's hand in marriage; Sender wants Leah to be married off to a rich man (Ansky 17). Sender's wish presents Khonon with an impossible obstacle to overcome -- he will never make enough money to satisfy Sender -- but Khonon thinks he can get over his feelings by immersing himself in Kabbalah: "Which sin is the hardest to conquer? The sin of lust for a woman..." (Ansky 14). Khonon delves deep into his Jewish identity to find the answers to his problems, which is ironic and arguably unproductive because the standards of his Jewish community created his problems in the first place.
In a way, though, Khonon's study of Kabbalah provides him a form of escape. He calls the Talmud "cold and dry" and then "speaks with animation" about his love of Kabbalah (Ansky 12). According to Khonon, there is "another world" that waits to be discovered. On the surface, he appears to be talking about his spirituality. A deeper reading, however, shows that his intentions are to leave his current world completely. In his present state, Khonon is unhappy. Concurrently, his Jewish peers live by the Talmud. Khonon's need to move beyond the Talmud shows that he already exists on a plane separate from his community. By expressing a keen interest in Kabbalah, Khonon principally leaves his Jewish community at the very beginning of the play.
Regardless of this, Khonon still tries to maintain a good relationship within his milieu of Jews. Even in his rant against the Talmud, he remembers to stay diplomatic: he calls it "profound" and "sublime"; its only problem is that it "shackles you to the earth" (Ansky 13). Assuming the Talmud represents Khonon's community, this statement means Khonon loves and appreciates his community but wants to move beyond it. Like Ruth, Khonon's possibilities are limited within his Jewish sphere. Technically, Kabbalah is an extension of this sphere, but it "tears the soul from its earthly bonds" (Ansky 13). If it exists outside the earth, it therefore exists outside Khonon's current Jewish world.
When Khonon's spirit enters Leah's body, he literally does remove himself from his "earthly bonds." Although this move is huge and bold, it is not exactly a complete move out of his community. Leah is still very much immersed in her Jewish identity as it exists within the community, so even though his body is liberated, Khonon enters a new body that is just as "shackled." In this way, his spirit is not completely free from the confines of his community. Though Khonon never gives an explanation for this move, one can assume that he chooses to enter Leah's body because he is in love with her. While this is, on some level, very romantic, it is also very invasive and highly presumptuous to assume that Leah would appreciate Khonon taking up residence inside of her. His actions are a metaphor for rape, which forces the audience to question Khonon's spiritual and personal integrity. In turn, the audience must question Khonon's decision to leave his community. If he must rape the woman he loves in order to release his shackles, then the end does not justify the means.
In order to understand Khonon's motives, his feelings about Kabbalah must be examined through a Freudian lens. When he discusses Kabbalah with Henekh, the stage directions show that Khonon's excitement slowly builds. He becomes "suddenly alert" and then "animated," (Ansky 12), showing that his interest piques when someone mentions Kabbalah. When Khonon finally addresses Kabbalah directly, he speaks "ecstatically" and his lines are punctuated with exclamation points. Then, he suddenly "falls" and says his "strength...fail[s]" him (Ansky 13). In short, this scene seems to show Khonon experience a spiritual orgasm.
This sexualizes Khonon's relationship to Kabbalah, but this does not make him blasphemous or impure. Rather, this reading connects the importance of asserting sexuality within spirituality. When Khonon relates the most profound level of Judaism to an orgasm, it implies that there is huge power in sexuality. Within the Jewish culture, there is a stigma against people who act on their sexual feelings. Ruth's treatment of Xanthippe and Khonon's notion of lust as the worst sin are prime examples of how sexual perceptions within the Jewish culture are, put simply, bad. Khonon's understanding of Kabbalah shows that there is a need to explore the connection between the physical and the spiritual. Khonon's spiritual rape of Leah, then, frees Leah from her similar "earthly bonds" (namely, her arranged marriage) and allows her to discover a whole new realm of her Judaism.
Ruth never reaches the spiritual nirvana that Khonon and Leah find together at the end of their play. This may be because she never comes to terms with her sexual agency. Khonon uses Leah's body to carry them into the Holy Land. In essence, Leah's body is a container for agency. Xanthippe's body serves a similar function: it holds Ruth's political power and sexual fantasy. These similarities shows the importance of the female body in relation to power and agency. Arguably, women are the oldest group of oppressed minorities, so perhaps feminine power derives from their experience living within the margin. Additionally, the Jews are also pushed into the margin, so Jewish women can be seen as a double minority. Power within the margins often stems from the oppressed people's anger. In this vein, it makes sense that the Jewish female body is the most powerful agent in these two texts.
On a superficial level, the destruction of New York City in The Puttermesser Papers looks like a result of the golem's sexual appetite. But by considering the city in relation to Leah's body as a vessel, it becomes clear that peace in New York ends because Ruth does not come to terms with her own sexual appetite. Ruth has no agency because she refuses to let sex permeate her life. Judging by her treatment of Xanthippe, Ruth seems to be afraid of sex. This further shows that Ruth is afraid of her own potential power. It also shows that she is not completely comfortable with her identity as a woman. Unfortunately for Ruth, she cannot take control of her life until she learns to use her sexuality as an agent. Her golem tries to show her the way, but Ruth resists. As a result, her life collapses; she cannot redefine herself outside her Jewish community. Leah and Khonon's move to the Holy Land shows that the only way to completely remove oneself from one's community is to explore one's sexual identity.
Feminine sexuality is accused of being monstrous in these texts because it is a form of escapism and an agent of change. When sexuality is explored within the Jewish community, it disrupts the balance of power. The Jews associate female sexuality with shame and guilt in order to police the boundaries of their community. That way, the community members will not discover their complete identities and thus decide to leave. The Jews believe that their community should wait for the Messiah together, but when people start exploring identities outside of their Jewish one, they discover their own forms of exile. As a minority group, the Jews need to keep as many of their people as possible in order to retain any sort of leverage over the hegemony. However, by denying the existence of sexuality in their culture, they dig themselves deeper into oppression.
