TISHREI TORAH
The rhythm of which parts of the Torah we read are pretty consistent from year to year, though there are differences about which exact parshiot fall into which month based on the Hebrew calendar. I’m going to pick themes from amongst the parshiot we typically read in a given month that call us back into connection with the more than human world.
My guiding philosophy is that our ancestors understood themselves as part of the more than human world, rather than disconnected and separate from it. That for them the more than human world was a possible “thou”, and never only an “it” that could be used as they desired without consequence. The kind of Judaism I want to open up as a possibility is the Judaism that takes this approach to the more than human world. As a consequence of this orientation, I’m particularly interested in agricultural aspects of Torah and hints of Gods and Goddesses other than YHVH. Why? Because I believe that our ancient ancestors believed in a range of divine beings and the suppression of this was part of the project of promoting patriarchy and the worship of only one God (YHVH)
We usually read three different parshiot during Tishrei. They are the last two short parshiot of Deuteronomy, Haazinu (Chapter 32) and VeZot Habracha (Chapters 33 and 34), and the first parsha of Genesis, Bereshit (Genesis Chapters 1-6:8). Of course, each Holiday has its own unique readings that are taken from the five books, but I’ve already talked about the holidays and created questions for them.
I’m going to explore four themes from amongst the parshiot and cherry pick one question for each theme. As you may know, I explore each parsha in more depth on my website. These four themes are:
· Cyclicality
· How to read the appeal to the more than human world
· The expulsion from the Garden of Eden
· How to connect to the more than human world.
The relationship between linear time in our lives and cyclicality is one of the great mysteries. On one hand, we live our lives in a linear way from birth to death; those of us who are elders will never be children or adolescents again. That is inevitable and inescapable. On the other hand, cyclicality is equally a defining feature of our lives. The seasons turn, the trees whose leaves rain down to the ground in the fall will grow new leaves come Spring.
The theme of cyclicality versus a linear conception is present in two of our three parshiot. Haazinu talks about YHVH finding the Jewish people. “YHVH found it [the people] in a wilderness land and in a formless place, a howling desert. He surrounded it. He attended to it, he guarded it like the pupil of his eye. As an eagle stirs its nest, hovers over its young, spreads its wings, takes it, lifts it on its pinion, YHVH alone led it, and no foreign God with him. (32:10-12). Both the words “formless” and hover” appear in only two places in the Hebrew Bible: here and in Genesis 1:2, parsha Bereshit. “When the earth had been shapeless and formless, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and God’s spirt was hovering on the face of the water” (Genesis 1:2). This is, I believe, a deliberate connection between the beginning of the five books of Moses and the end of the books. And this connection between the beginning and the end is the very definition of cyclicality.
How should we read the very first sentence of the Bible? If you are like me, you learned this sentence in Hebrew school as “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” But, as scholars have been arguing for a long time, this doesn’t quite capture the grammar of the sentence. Our ancestors, the Masoretes, added the vowels for the Hebrew readings of the Bible in the 5th to 10th Centuries and they added the vowel for the indefinite article, rather than the definite article. That is they added the vowel for “a” instead of “the.” It is my speculation that they were preserving an ancient oral tradition of pronouncing the first “bereshit,” or “in a beginning,” rather than “bareshit” in the beginning. For more background, please consult Rav Google for some learned defenses of the traditional translation and this article arguing against the traditional translation https://ancienthebrewgrammar.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/genesis-1-hebrew-grammar-translation/
Translating this opening word as “In a beginning” opens up the view of history as cyclical, rather than linear. The reading most of us learned in Hebrew school has us going from the creation of the one and only cosmos to the redemption of that world with the coming (or second coming for Christians) of the Messiah. That’s a linear process. But many traditional societies viewed history as cyclical. Aztecs talked about our world as part of the fifth cosmic cycle (The Fifth Sun by Brundage), Indians from South Asia talked about multiple cosmic cycles and Eliade adduces more examples in his Myth of Eternal Return. The common core idea is that this cosmos, like the rest of creation is born and dies and is then again reborn; the cosmos is no different in this regard than the cycles of wet and dry or the four seasons, or the life of plants, trees, birds, mammals.
Why is this important? Because the extent to which we focus on linear vs cyclical time situates us in relationship to the cosmos. It also has implications for how you view your life. If, like me, you resonate to cyclicality, then the linear view of time stretching from a unique creation to a final redemption feels wrongheaded. Reincarnation in some sense seems to follow and you focus more on the cycles of life. On the other hand, if you resonate more to the linear view, then you are likely to view death as more final, be interested in Messianism, subscribe to some kind of view of progress in history. These are really different ways to orient ourselves.
It's not necessarily an either or kind of choice and our lives contain both cyclical and linear aspects. Jewish calendars are cyclical (how could they not be?). The more than human world, it seems to me, is inevitably cyclical. But we live our lives in this very body in a linear way.
In your body, are you oriented more towards linear or cyclical views of time and what are the implications for you?
Haazinu begins with an appeal for the more than human world to listen to Moses. “Listen skies so I may speak and let the earth hear what my mouth says.” (32:1). Then it switches to a plea that the people receive his teaching like the more than human world receives life giving rain. “Let my teaching come down like showers, let my saying emerge like dew, like raindrops on plants and like rainfalls on herbs.” (32:2). It is tempting to treat these as mere metaphors, metaphors that have weakened over time. They have weakened because we feel (wrongly), less and less dependent upon rain from the sky and we are more and more disconnected from the more than human world.
But what if this weren’t a metaphor at all? What if we see Moses as asking for the participation of the more than human world in conveying his final teaching? Invoking the skies and the earth, I would suggest, is a way to cover the entirety of the more than human world. If this is a metaphor, then Moses is simply asking his human audience to listen attentively in a poetic way. But if it is not just a metaphor, then he is including the more than human world as part of his audience and he is asking his human audience to have his words, not just be mere words, but to let the words literally, not just metaphorically, penetrate to their very cells, as rain does in plants.
A literal reading of this opening verse implies that what Moses has to say is for the whole world, not just the human world. It implies that the world can listen—or not, just as we humans can listen—or not. It implies a great continuity between humans, skies, earth, rain, dew, plants. A literal reading strengthens the possibility of treating the more than human world at times as a “thou” to use Buber’s language, rather than always as an “it”, as is the wont of modern human society.
It’s easy for us to read these verses metaphorically; that’s what we have been trained to do because we tend not to believe that the more than human world can have any agency. A literal reading of these verses implies that the more than human world is alive and on the same ontological plane as we humans are—they are just differently bodied. I can’t smell as well as my dog, be as patient as the rocks in my woods, live as long or be as resistant to fire as the Redwoods. This is the core of the philosophy of Animism, the guiding philosophy of our ancestors and of indigenous people. The world is alive.
Go outside somewhere and have a conversation with a tree or a squirrel, or a rock or a plant. What did you learn about yourself and about the being with whom you conversed?
The expulsion from the Garden of Eden is what actually makes us human. Thus, counter to the traditional reading, the expulsion is not a tragedy to be overcome, but something to embrace. We don’t have to get back to the Garden, because there is no going back.
Humans are expelled from the Garden of Eden so we don’t live forever. As the text tells us “Here the human has become like one of us, to know good and bad. And now, in case he’ll put out his hand and take from the tree of life as well and eat and live forever. And YHVH God put him out of the Garden of Eden, to work the ground from which he was taken.” (3:22-23) But we humans are not meant to live forever. We are meant to be part of the cycle of birth and death and rebirth, just like serpents are meant to crawl on their bellies (3:14), childbirth is meant to be painful for women (3:16), and we get our food through the sweat of our brows (3:19) whether that is through agriculture, gathering or hunting. Sweat is good. The expulsion makes us human.
If the expulsion is not a tragedy, this changes the entire trajectory of a story whose through line is that we seek to return to the paradise of the garden of Eden, whether that is an earthly redemption through the Messiah or a place in heaven near God. If the expulsion is not a tragedy, then we are right where we are supposed to be. If the expulsion is not a tragedy, the challenge is to embrace our human finitude, rather than attempt to deny it by dreaming of a world in which we won’t die and in which we aren’t limited. Perhaps this even challenges the idea of an eternal God who doesn’t die.
I want to offer a note on the nature of the sin for which we were expelled. We are used to thinking that the sin that caused expulsion from the Garden of Eden is sexuality, but this is a Christian and not Jewish reading. God says to the earthling “Because you listened to your woman’s voice and ate from the tree about which I commanded you saying, ‘You shall not eat from it.” (3:18) The sin is disobedience, not sexuality.
How do we embrace our finitude as humans? How do we embrace the sweat of our brow?
The ways to connect with the more than human world are infinite. Cain is the oldest son who becomes a tiller of the earth. Abel is a sheep herder (4:2). Cain brings an offering “from the fruit of the soil” and Abel brings “the choicest of the firstlings of his flock.” (4:3). God prefers Abel’s sheep offering and ignores Cain’s offering. Cain becomes angry and kills Abel, as we all know. Cain becomes cursed to wander the world, though he is still under some sort of divine protection. Instead of wandering, the text tells us he settles east of Eden in the land of Nod (4:16)
Cain and Abel practice two different kinds of agriculture which are often in practical tension with each other, because the best land for growing grain, for instance, is also the best land for pasture for animals. The permaculture rubric would have us use the most productive land for direct to human crops—think wheat instead of pasture. Our ancestors knew this and also knew that livestock can be raised successfully on more marginal and less intensively managed land. This is true in Israel, the Western United States where sheep are extensively grazed on less productive land and here in the east if you look at how land was used even 100 years ago. But—the divine prefers the offering of the sheep. Isaac prefers the hunting of Esau (not even agriculture) over the great sheepherder of Jacob who manages to both grow his uncle Laban’s flocks and fleece him at the same time.
Further, how we connect with the more than human world comes in a great multiplicity of forms. I connect most by raising animals to eat grass and lust after rich bottom land that would be better used for human crops—but I would prefer to graze cattle on them. Someone else can’t relate at all to cattle who they think are domesticated idiots, but are enthralled with the skills needed to track and hunt large animals the way that the !San Bushman do in South Africa—that’s Jon Young who has inspired a generation of followers to forge connections with the more than human world. Someone else relates more through medicinal wildcrafted herbs, a kind of gathering. Someone else is a great herb gardener growing 100 kinds of herbs that can be used in cooking or in teas. Someone else is all about growing the three sisters, beans, corn and squash, the staples of indigenous American agriculture, someone else about fishing, another person about hiking in mountains or kayaking in the ocean or talking with trees.
In a world in which the poverty of being connected with and caring for the more than human world is literally a potential source of human suicide, it seems to me a kind of quaint privilege to elevate one kind of connection (sheepherding) over another (raising the fruit of the soil). We need to facilitate human connection to the more than human world in whatever form is possible.
How are you most connected to the more than human world and how can you increase that connection?
QUESTIONS
In your body, are you oriented more towards linear or cyclical views of time and what are the implications for you?
Go outside somewhere and have a conversation with a tree or a squirrel, or a rock or a plant. What did you learn about yourself and about the being with whom you conversed?
How do we embrace our finitude as humans? How do we embrace the sweat of our brow?
How are you most connected to the more than human world and how can you increase that connection?
