SHVAT TORAH
The four parshiot in Sh’vat take us from the culmination of the ten plagues and the exodus from Egypt through the revelation at Sinai and the first iteration of what we call the ten commandments to the first sets of laws we are given. It’s a highly eventful set of parshiot, well worth our study and reflection as we seek to understand and learn from our ancestors.
I’m going to pick one theme from each of the parshiot. For more discussion, see my commentaries on the website.
· Sympathetic magic and drying out from Bo
· Representations of male and female divine energy from B’shelach
· Preparation for the appearance of the divine from Yithro
· Land, domestic animals and rights and obligations from Mishpatim
Sympathetic magic is the idea of like influencing like. In our crude idea of “voodoo,” a practitioner sticks pins in a representation of someone and they will feel like pins have actually been stuck in them because they are like their representation of them.
We’ve all learned that we eat matzah on Passover because we didn’t have enough time to let the dough rise. We are even told that in this parsha (12:34,39). But this simply makes no sense in the story. First, the Israelites are given time to shake down their neighbors. You are about to flee your house because a wildfire is coming. What’s more important, making bread ready for your journey or knocking on your neighbor’s door and asking to borrow their silver and gold? (11:2-3). Further, our ancestors were given four days notice of the ritual. 12:3 has the Israelites choosing a lamb or a goat without blemish for the sacrifice on the 10th of the month, and keeping watch over it until the 14th of the month when the sacrifice was slaughtered. Time enough to make bread. Then Chapter 12 verses 8 and 9 tell us about how we can eat the meat and goes out of the way to say that it can only be roasted, not cooked with water, and consumed that very night (I don’t have a theory for why it has to be eaten that night.)
What matzah and this direction for how to cook the meat have in common is that both are dry. Dry is super important because of what is happening ecologically in the land of Israel. Passover marks the transition from the wet season to the dry season. No rain is crucial for the ripening of first the barley and then the wheat. If it rains too much during the 50 days of the grain harvest aka the Omer to modern Jews, the grain will sprout and then can’t be stored for the winter. Given that grain is an absolute mainstay of the diet, a wet spring when it is supposed to turn dry was absolutely crucial to our ancestors who would do whatever they could to ensure the needed dryness—including afflicting us with matzah. For a wonderful book on ancient Israel agriculture see Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel.
Eating dry foods is a way of praying for dry weather and a way of aligning ourselves with what we hope will happen in the more than human world. It’s magic because it isn’t harvesting corn and putting it in enormous grain elevators and frying the planet with natural gas to dry the harvested corn which is not dry enough to store.
Wet and dry can be difficult metaphors for us to grasp if we come from an eco system where precipitation is a year round phenomenon, though we do talk about droughts and going through dry spells when it comes to creativity or romantic partners. It’s perhaps more common for us to talk about hot and cold, as in someone with a temper runs too hot or someone who hides or suppresses too much of their emotions is cold. The advantage of the unfamiliarity of the metaphor for those of us who have grown up in Continental Ecosystems is that dwelling with it might open up some new horizons precisely because of its unfamiliarity.
What in your life needs to dry out, like matzah? What needs to be wetter? Are there actions you can take to be aligned with what you want to have happen in the more than human world?
B’shelach offers us two images of the divine that we may construe as representations of male and female energy. We see the YVHV as warrior and healer. We are also introduced to the idea of female prophets with Miriam and her celebration after the destruction of Pharoah’s army. Here’s the story.
The Israelites sing something called The Song of the Sea after Pharoah and his army are drowned. We recite a portion of the song almost every time we pray when we say Mi Chamocha B’elim Adonai and Adonai Yimloch L’olam Va’ed, The song follows an Ancient Near East mythological theme where the Storm God, for example the Babylonian Marduk, kills the female Sea God (Tiamat in the Babylonian myth) and then builds a palace. Here’s just a little of our bloodthirsty imagery. “Your right hand YHVH, glorious in power, Your right hand YHVH shatters the foe. In your great triumph, you break your opponents, you send forth your fury, it consumes them like straw.” (15:6-7). On the other hand, in the usual attempt to get humans to obey him (think Garden of Eden), here’s YHVH a scant few verses later “If you will heed YHVH your God diligently, doing what is upright in his sight, giving ear to his commandments and keeping all his laws, then I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians, for I, YHVH am your healer.” (15:26). Personally, I have a hard time wrapping my head around a being who can be represented as both a warrior and a healer; I have this sense of whiplash.
We should note that there is a long history of interpreting the warrior God as being about the necessity for inner struggle, though I’m still not a fan of shattering my inner limitations with fury after I break their bones. By the way, this tension is exactly present in Islam in the concept of Jihad which many scholars and practitioners present as being about internal spiritual struggle, and not killing infidels.
The text also, at least for me, begs us to explore the differences between male and female spirituality. While certainly women can be warriors and men can be healers, and I’d rather see myself as a healer than a warrior, warrior is typically viewed as an embodiment of masculine energy and healing as an embodiment of female energy. Is our text suggesting something about the necessity for both male and female energy, both in the dual images of the divine and in the presence of both male and female spiritual leadership as we see Miriam as a leader when she leads the women in dancing after the recital of the song at the sea?
If we want to be whole, I believe, we need to incorporate both what might be called male and female aspect. We need prophets and prophetesses, we need to dance with timbrels in our hands and we need to be warriors (though perhaps in a less violent way). If we look at where we are incomplete in our lives, there’s a decent chance that we’ve cut ourselves off from our male or female sides.
How do you reconcile those two images of warrior and healer? Which speaks to you when?
Lights, camera, action. How do we prepare? Chapter 19 details the first direct experience of YHVH for the Hebrew people. He’s been showing off his deeds, talking to Moses and having Moses relay his messages to the people. But this is the first direct revelation. There’s thunder, lightning, a very loud blast of the shofar, a thick cloud on the mountain, then smoke and the whole mountain trembling with the ongoing blare of the shofar getting louder and louder. The people are trembling (19:16) and that’s before the pyrotechnics get into full swing.
Appearances of the divine are called “hierophanies” in the academic study of religion. Hierophanies are almost always unexpected. They come to us through grace, to use the Christian term, not through anything we have earned. They are unpredictable. As religious practitioners we may pray for them, yearn them, fear them but we cannot simply produce them on demand. Suzuki Roshi says that enlightenment experiences are an accident, and the purpose of practice is to become accident prone. So it is weird to start with that this hierophany is announced in advance.
It's also a bit strange that it is so public. Visions are usually solo—that’s why we go on vision fasts. Paul had his conversion vision on the road to Damascus—everyone else nearby was just walking.
How were the people supposed to prepare for the awesome appearance of the divine? Here’s what our text gives us. YHVH says to Moses “Go to the people and warn them to stay pure today and tomorrow. Let them wash their clothes. Let them be ready for the third day, for on the third day YHVH will come down in the sight of all the people on Mount Sinai.” (19:10-11) What does “stay pure” mean? Moses provides the answer in verse 15 “Do not go near a woman,” meaning don’t have sex. I don’t believe there is such a thing as a 100% adequate preparation, but this isn’t even remotely close. No wonder “And all the people were seeing the thunders and the flashes and the sound of the horn (shofar) and the mountain smoking. And the people saw, and they moved and stood at a distance and said to Moses “You speak with us so that we may listen, but let not God speak with us or else we’ll die.” (20:18-19)
This notion of purity is all kinds of problematic. The idea that sex is polluting is at the heart of the patriarchal devaluation of women, the body and everything we call “nature.” It is how humans have justified the divorce between humans and the more than human world. The consequences of that are our current process of committing both ecocide and suicide, as we destroy the world that is the very foundation of the possibility of our biological life.
The concept of purification makes sense to me. If we are going to encounter the divine, we need to make ourselves ready; it’s not like buying a ticket to a movie theatre. Purification through prayer, through ritual, through fasting, through separating ourselves from our everyday life, absolutely. All that applies equally to everyone, regardless of gender. But let us recognize a volley in the war against women, against the world, against ourselves.
It’s easy enough to say we want to experience the divine, but as this chapter teaches us, to experience the divine is a profoundly scary thing, not at all for the faint of heart. If you want to grow, if you want to become a spiritual adult, courage is a prime virtue. You get to tremble, sure, and you have to be like Moses and Aaron and climb the mountain. Contrary to the text, “Let not the priests or the people break through and come up to YHVH , lest YHVH break out against them” (19:24), I don’t think we can afford to restrict direct access to the divine to just the very select few.
How do you think of purification? What means can you use to purify yourself in preparation to encounter the divine? How important do you think courage is as a spiritual virtue? When have you been courageous in your own life?
Domestic animals and land have the same rights and obligations as humans do. I believe that’s the clear implication of our text. Here’s what it says about livestock. YHVH tells the Hebrews, “You shall give me the first born among your sons. You shall do the same with your cattle and your flocks, seven days it (or he) shall remain with its (his) mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to me.” (22:28-9). Here’s what it says about land. “Six years you shall sow your land and gather its yield, but in the seventh you shall let it rest and lie fallow….Six days shall you do your work, but on the seventh day you shall cease from labor, in order that your ox and your ass may rest” (23:10-12) These verses lay out an obvious parallel between domestic animals and humans, and then between humans and the land.
There’s an obvious difference that humans can choose to break the commandment to rest on Shabbat, and thereby force their livestock to work. We can break the shmita commandment to give the land a rest and force it to produce. But the parallel seems more compelling to me. The land and the livestock, both in their own way, have the privilege to observe Shabbat just as we humans do. The livestock have the same obligation as we humans do to redeem the first born males, and that happens on the 8th day, just as the brit milah ceremony happens.
Animism, following Descola a prominent French anthropologist, is the belief that all beings are alive and have the same ontological status—it’s just that we have different bodies so we perceive things differently. In an animist world, squirrels are alive, rocks are alive, rivers are alive—they are just differently bodied. That’s exactly what our texts are saying. Animism is a radical rejection of the worldview that humans are on top and are free to do what they want with other beings.
I want to emphasize both rights and obligations, as the parsha does. It’s not just that animals are created in the divine image and therefore have rights—it is a stronger claim than that. The fact that livestock have obligations makes them more like humans. On the other hand, it is less clear to me what we might mean by saying that land has an obligation to the divine.
Do you believe that animals have the same rights and obligations in relationship with the divine as humans? What about land? What would the implications be if we took an animist world view seriously?
QUESTIONS
What in your life needs to dry out, like matzah? What needs to be wetter? Are there actions you can take to be aligned with what you want to have happen in the more than human world?
How do you reconcile those two images of warrior and healer? Which speaks to you when?
How do you think of purification? What means can you use to purify yourself in preparation to encounter the divine? How important do you think courage is as a spiritual virtue? When have you been courageous in your own life?
Do you believe that animals have the same rights and obligations in relationship with the divine as humans? What about land? What would the implications be if we took an animist world view seriously?
What Drying in field