Ani Le Dodi Ve Dodi Li

by Andrea Johnson

The simple gold wedding band I wear on the twisted finger of my right hand is, like my marriage, deceptively plain and unadorned.

Before our marriage, Holmes surprised me by having the inside of the band engraved with these words from the Song of Songs: "Ani Le Dodi Ve Dodi Li." "I am my beloved's, my beloved is mine," he whispered in English when he slipped the band upon my finger. His face was somber, yet his eyes were suffused with emotion.I remember still how that band glinted in the sunlight from the window, bright with promise, as lovely as the ancient love song. Surely this must be basheert, meant to be, I thought.

I had believed my new husband completely unversed in the traditions of my people and the language we used during our prayers. Never would I get his limits, I thought as he bent to seal our vows with a kiss. This proved more true as the years passed.

From the beginning of our partnership, Holmes had considered my theological studies largely a waste and regretted the time they took from our detection. This area of serious mutual incomprehension was often a source of friction between us, despite Holmes's nod to tradition when we exchanged our vows.

Part of the problem at first, I think, was that Holmes wanted more of my time and attention and regarded my theological studies as his most serious rival. At the same time he was proud of my accomplishments and knew that my studies were essential to my sense of self. Holmes was nothing if not contradictory.

Another difficulty was Holmes's own complex attitude towards religion. Holmes could not prove G-d's existence as he could prove the identity of a thief with a set of footprints in the mud. He did see that man's inhumanity to man often resulted from conflicting religious beliefs. He occasionally said the world would be better served if all government officials were required to swear off allegiance to religion. Later in our marriage, I learned that his eldest brother's involvement in a religious cult was partially to blame for his distaste for organized religion.

Yet there was also a part of him that was intrigued by the divine. Rather than an unbeliever, I should say that Holmes was a seeker after G-d. He was at least nominally Anglican and had spent a great amount of time with his godfather, the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, when he was a child. Later, his time with Kim O'Hara and his lama and their wanderings throughout Tibet struck a further chord with him. Sometimes he longed for that time of relative simplicity.

I think also that his partnership with me and our time together in Jerusalem prompted an interest in Judaism. He occasionally aided me in my research for my book on Sophia, or divine wisdom, in the Jewish Bible and displayed more than a passing acquaintance with that ancient tome. I know that the growing anti-Semitism in Germany and in our own England stung him. Holmes stood on the side of those who were oppressed and burned to bring their tormentors to justice.

One of the fruits of our maturing marriage was Holmes's surprising willingness to raise our children in the Jewish faith. I had my first real inkling of this sea change in Holmes after the birth of our son, Jack.

The subject of a bris had of course not arisen after the birth of our daughter Judith, as she was a girl. The elaborate naming ceremonies that later became common in the 1960s for Jewish daughters were not yet in fashion. But as she grew, I was pleased to see that Holmes had no real objection to my teaching our daughter the Hebrew prayers I had learned from my own mother.

As children of a Jewish mother, Judith and Jack were both accounted Jewish by the rabbinical courts. However, the brit milah, the ritual circumcision performed on the eighth day after a Jewish boy's birth, was a different matter than mere acceptance of a child's religious heritage. I knew a bris would require from Holmes a new level of acknowledgement, even participation in our children's Jewishness. Circumcision is a religious obligation required of every Jewish male, one that marks him as belonging to the covenant of Israel. Even I, who was far from a devout Jew, would not have dreamed of foregoing it.

I remembered my brother Levi's bris, my grandparents' London house filled with relatives, the prayers, the songs, the feasting and rejoicing. An empty chair had been set aside for the prophet Elijah. I remembered watching as the sandek, my grandfather, carried the baby into the room on a ceremonial cushion. My brother's naked legs were splayed, held in position for the ritual, and he screamed in pain when the mohel murmured the ceremonial prayer and removed his foreskin. My mother winced and brushed a tear from her eye and the crowd of relatives watched and prayed. My five-year-old self was bewildered at this strange state of affairs. Yet seconds later, the room was filled with song and my whimpering brother was being consoled in our mother's arms.

This, then, is what it means to be a Jew: the bitter with the sweet, the joy with the pain, the sense of being marked as one apart and belonging to the Lord G-d of Israel. We do this because G-d himself has commanded it.

I feared that Holmes would regard this ritual as barbaric and refuse outright to even consider it should our baby be a son. Holmes had himself been circumcised for medical reasons when he was a child, though when he was old enough to remember. He had found the procedure painful and disturbing.

Somehow I neglected to raise the subject at all during the pregnancy. There was no chance to raise it in the days after the birth, as I floated in and out of consciousness and fought off infection. When I returned to myself, I was shocked to learn that Holmes had arranged for a mohel, who was also a medical doctor, to perform the circumcision in hospital. Holmes had asked my mother's cousins, the elves, for the name of a mohel willing to travel to Sussex and perform the bris under such unusual circumstances, at such short notice.

I still do not know what else my cousins said to him; I never cared to ask. If I had thought much on the subject, I might have wondered how these talented cousins viewed my marriage to a gentile who was 39 years older than myself. My mother had been considered daring to marry her American goy in Paris. Another family would have declared her dead and sat shiva for her. But my mother had always been her parents' favorite child. She succeeded in doing things others in the family wouldn't dare to do. To the elves, my marriage must have seemed a continuation of my mother's outrageousness.

Yet they helped Holmes. The mohel they recommended was yet another distant cousin of my mother's, one of the first to combine a medical career with his religious duties. Watson told me he was probably the first mohel ever to walk through the hospital doors. Nurses and doctors stared at this quaintly dressed Jewish doctor. Circumcision was relatively uncommon for English boys of that era and Jewish religious rituals certainly did not take place every day in our village backwater.

It was far from a traditional bris. I was still unconscious, so the baby and the mohel were the only Jews present in that sterile hospital room. I am grateful that Watson, at least, was there to support Holmes. As Watson described the scene for me later, all of them were tense.

Holmes first annoyed the mohel by insisting that pain medication be administered to the child, against both medical and religious traditon. Babies were normally given a cloth soaked in wine to suck during the procedure. Holmes wanted anaesthetic. Holmes said the notion that babies feel less pain than adults was nonsense. Against tradition, Holmes himself held our son during the ritual, positioning his legs and holding them wide apart as the mohel murmured the prayer and removed Jack's foreskin.

"He looked as though he were going under the knife himself," Watson said. "I think it hurt him more than it did little Jack."

The baby cried from fright, not from pain, thanks to Holmes's insistence on pain relief, but Watson said Holmes still looked ill. Then Holmes departed further from tradition.

"Let his name be called in Yisroel as Yaakov..." the mohel said.

"The son of Mary," Holmes finished, his expression daring the mohel to contradict him, as he cradled our son close to his chest, cuddling him and murmuring apologies into his tiny ears.

Jack was the son of an emancipated Jewish woman of the twentieth century. The mohel was a Jewish man with many attitudes from the nineteenth. He gratefully made his departure, having done his duty by this child and his strange parents.

"I did what Russell would have wanted me to do," Holmes told Watson after the mohel had left. Then Watson said that Holmes did something else that surprised him.

"He went to the window with the baby and he looked out at the sky," Watson told me quietly. "I think he had forgotten I was even there. I know I'd never heard him pray before. But, Mary dear, he had tears in his eyes when he said, 'Please, G-d, don't take my wife.'"

I do not know whether Holmes honored the covenant only out of respect for me or because of a bargain he made with the deity, but I have drawn my own conclusions over the years.

Nearly every Hebrew blessing begins with these words of praise: Barukh atah Adonai Elohaynu melekh ha-olam. Blessed are you, Lord, Our God, Master of the Universe... I heard Holmes praying these words at my bedside when I awakened in hospital.

"He answered me," Holmes told me later. He refused to say any more on the subject.