The Harlot Masquerade: Part Two: Marc Gafni

There is much to say about this terse but telling scene. For now, let’s focus on the beginning. Hiyya was, it seems, an ascetic who viewed the denial of sexuality as the path to holiness. His wife had apparently agreed to let him pursue this path, although it was at the expense of her sexual fulfillment. In biblical myth law, a man is obligated by law to fulfill his wife’s sexual desire. Therefore the interpreters of the text concluded that she must have consented to forgo her right. Evidently however she was not happy about it. At this stage in her life sexual seeing was not unrelated to emotional seeing. She feels completely unseen in her own house.

Apparently the couple did not talk a lot, for the only way she gains a window into Hiyya’s inner thoughts is by overhearing his prayer: “God save me from sexual sin.” She realizes that her pious husband had not succeeded in transcending the sensual. Far from being disappointed, she is thrilled. Perhaps now they can return to the sexual world he had forced them to leave behind.

Unable to talk to him openly about her desire, profoundly unseen, she dresses up as a prostitute. Her motives in the story are not completely clear. Some say she is angry over the wasted years; she wants to entrap and then accuse him. A diametrically opposed suggestion; she loves him so she wants to be with him even if she is invisible.

A good friend, talmudic scholar and woman, rejects both suggestions. In her reading this elaborate ruse to is in order to fan his smoldering desire in a way which brings him back to his natural sexual and loving self.

Although Hiyya usually studies at the academy; On this day he studies in the Garden. The Garden represents a place of magic and sensuality, the alluring domain of nymphs and Goddesses of nature. There he positions himself to study. It is an unconscious reaching for the Erotic. Dressed as Heruta, which in Hebrew brings to mind the word herut, freedom — his wife walks provocatively past him as he piously pours over his tomes.

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