I have a mental illness. I was practically born with it: at five I went to my first psychiatrist; at thirteen I was diagnosed with Major Depression and placed in a hospital; at twenty-one my illness “blossomed” and I was rediagnosed with bipolar schizoaffective disorder. (For those curious, bipolar refers to moodiness and schizoaffective refers to mild hallucinating.) Normally illness is not what inspires my work, but in the case of my work in progress, The Bible According to Eve, the original idea was inspired by a hallucination I had.

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In a sense it was even embedded in the location where I was. I was working as a volunteer at a club for the mentally ill. My job was to teach students math and English at the remedial level. I had a college degree and it was clear from the first that I was “high functioning” and able to help ones who were not-so-high-functioning.

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One day, however, I was hallucinating too badly to work and one of the things I “saw” was myself as Eve with a male friend in a “Garden” being harassed by Ahair. Why Ahair? Well, in the Talmud, there was a rabbi named Elisha ben-Avuyah. One day he saw a young boy in a tree brushing the birds away from the eggs in their nest in order to bring them down to his aged and crippled father. Then the boy fell from the tree and died. The rabbi then became Ahair, an ardent atheist. So Ahair entered my own personal mythology.

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Haunted by my hallucination with its bogeyman of a less sympathetic Ahair, I wrote a poem. I remember the hallucination to remember that I had an abiding sense that Ahair must be visiting me for some sin, although I knew that wasn’t real.

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We discovered a land of

dark colors, of blood reds and

deep greens of the same shades as

pine needles on trees throughout

the year, from flowering to

snow burying life itself—

but leaving the leaves in tact.

There was a pomegranate tree

that we were told not to pick

and eat fruit from its branches

that grew deep within Eden,

in which we basked in chastely

as children, yet still bound by

the wrists as before we’d been

in the cave of dark Ahair.

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This poem led to a larger project: a woman’s Bible with one poem for each woman or reference to a woman in the Bible, which in turn led to another project.

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I had heard in a class a long time ago that, when they tell their stories, women talk in terms of relationships while men talk in terms of accomplishments. One section that I found intriguing while working on my Bible project early on was the relationships between Jacob’s wives and concubines, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah and Bilhah. I used the four of them as vehicles to write about polygamy. In working on women in the Torah, I tried to think in terms of relationships. Inspired by that, I wrote this:

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As a child Joseph carried rumors

of the sons of his stepmothers, maids

and concubines of their spouse Jacob.

He told his father that they complained

of Jacob as a lecherous fool,

egged on by their own mothers, who laughed

that behind Jacob’s back that it was

the once shy Leah who kept the tents

as managed as they were while the maids

kept it clean while the love-lorn Jacob

would wander, lost in his self-pity

which he said was grief because he lost

his one love, Rachel, and could only

thank God that he still had young Joseph…

through Joseph… [Father Jacob] learned of

poor Reuben’s indiscretion with ‘her,’

sad Bilhah, who would have been stoned by

the angry Jacob had not Leah

come between the two of them, and so

proved Leah had since her youth become

quite formidable, unyielding and

as uncompromising towards Jacob as

the power within ‘his’ tents as she

had continued her wrathful struggle

with the dead Rachel, lovelier in

the grave than she had been in her life.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Jennifer Alderson, Guest Blogger

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Jennifer Alderson was born in Topeka, KS in 1978. She moved at age eight to Wichita,  finished high school at East High and went on to Friends University. In between starting and finishing school in 2001, Jenny started what would be an unusually long conversion process to Judaism from her original Protestant faith, converting eventually with a rabbi ordained both Orthodox and Conservative. Although she attends both Reform and Orthodox synagogues, she considers herself Conservative. She is a writer and poet whose work has been published in Poetica Magazine and Mim'amakim. She is presently working on her book The Bible According to Eve. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

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