Parshat Vayera
In The Front, a movie about the McCarthy era, Woody Allen’s character is asked if he knows a suspected communist. Allen at his whiny – nebishy best tries to dodge the question …
“When you say “know,” can you ever really know a person?”
“Would you say I know him? Can you know…? “
and finishes with my favorite quote from the movie:
“In a biblical sense, know him?”
Allen is of course referring to Carnal Knowledge.
With the conception of Isaac… I have a similar question. Genesis 21: 1
1 And the LORD remembered Sarah as He had said, and the LORD did unto Sarah as He had spoken.
The word for “remembered” (Hebrew “pakad”) is a euphemism for having marital connection with… (see Jastrow Dictionary p1206) and see Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 62b]:
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said: Whosoever knows his wife to be a God-fearing woman and does not duly visit her (in a conjugal sense – pakad) is called a sinner; for it is said:
And thou shalt know that thy tent is in peace; and thou shalt visit thy habitation, and shalt miss nothing. Thou shalt know also that thy seed shall be great, and thine offspring as the grass of the earth. (Job 5:24-25)
“Rabbi Joshua ben Levi further stated: “It is a man’s duty to pay a (conjugal) visit to his wife before he departs on a journey; for it is said: “And thou shalt know that thy tent is in peace; and thou shalt visit thy habitation, and shalt miss nothing.”
Admittedly, Pakad can also mean: to remember, to command, to record as well as refer to a neighborly visit, but even when used with a G-Rating, the Rabbis were not shy from interjecting a little sexual innuendo to the meaning of Pakad.
These are the accounts of the tabernacle, even the tabernacle of the testimony, as they were rendered according to the commandment of Moses, (Exodus 38:21)
These are the records (pikudei) of the Tabernacle: You find that when Israel was in harsh labor in Egypt, Pharaoh decreed that the men must not sleep in their homes, so that they would not engage in sexual relations with their wives. Rabbi Shimon bar Halafta said: What did the daughters of Israel do? They went down to draw water from the Nile and God would bring little fish into their buckets. They cooked some fish and sold the rest, buying wine with the proceeds. Then they went out to the fields and fed their husbands. After eating and drinking, the women would take bronze mirrors and look at them with their husbands. The wife would say “I’m prettier than you,” and the husband would reply, “I’m more beautiful than you.” Thus they would arouse themselves to desire and they would then “be fruitful and multiply,” and God took note of them (pakad) immediately. Some of our sages said, They bore two children at a time, others said, six and others said twelve, and still others said six hundred thousand…and all these numbers from those mirrors….And all these numbers from mirrors…In the merit of those mirrors which they showed their husbands to accustom them to desire, from the midst of the harsh labor, they raised up all the hosts, as it is said, “All the hosts of God went out of the land of Egypt” (Ex. 12:41) and it is said, “God brought the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt in their hosts” (12:51). –Midrash Tanchuma; Pikudei 9
So according to the Rabbis of the Midrash, that which God remembered (pakad) were the conjugal visits (pekudai) of the women of Israel.
So my question is: When God “visited” Sarah… was it in the biblical sense… was it a visit of the conjugal variety? Or to put it slightly differently… what is the nature of Divine Birth in our tradition?
In a previous blog post (Prince William Chose Well) I explored incest in the Biblical tradition. I’d like to continue that exploration, this time, with an emphasis on divine birth.
The belief in a divine child is the core of the Jesus myth and we Jews like to think that it is totally alien to Judaism, but the truth is that not only was the child of god fairly common in ancient lore as anyone familiar with the Bible will recognize, the barren matriarch is a common Biblical theme, followed by a miraculous birth. Since any miraculous birth is by definition a divine birth we have to admit that the notion of a son of God is hardly unique to Christianity. My follow-up question is how divine birth as an idea, developed differently in Judaism.
In a book that I referenced in my previous blog, and subsequently purchased; (The Logic of Incest: A Structuralist Analysis of Hebrew Mythology 1995 by Seth Daniel Kunin, the author defines “‘Divine birth’ to mean a transformation whereby the individual is changed from being a product of natural (human) descent to one of divine descent. Although in many of the cases of ‘divine birth’ no actual birth takes place, the term birth is used because the texts often highlight the transformation with a denial of human or natural birth, they also often include elements associated with birth, that is, renaming and words meaning birth. These texts also often include rituals or events similar to rites of passage.”… “All of the ‘divine birth’ texts also include a denial of human fertility.” [Kunin notes 1 to page 63 and 64]
Isaac’s mother is a woman of 90 and barren. Her husband, Abraham at 99, is no youngster. Miraculously Sarah gives birth… Unlike similar stories of miraculous births in both the Old and New Testaments, in the case of the conception of Isaac, both natural father and mother are barren. They are divinely re-born and given new names Abram to Abraham and Sarai to Sarah. In addition, Abraham enters into a covenant ‘between the pieces’ where “Abraham is asked to make a bloody pathway consisting of progressively smaller animals… the passage through the bloody path can be interpreted as a symbolic birth or new beginning” [Kunin page 73] … a birth canal.
Even when Isaac is born, Abraham (his natural father) is asked to distance, disconnect himself from his natural son by sacrificing him where (according to at least one Midrashic account) he is actually slaughtered and then re-born (resurrected) by God.
In Pirke deRabbi Eliezer we find a clear reference to the death and (divine) re-birth of Isaac at the Akeda. “Towards the end of the texts discussing Gen. 22 it states, ‘When the sword touched Isaac’s throat, terrified, his soul fled. Immediately (God’s) his voice was heard from between the angels, and he said “do not lay your hand on the boy”, thereupon his soul was returned to his body… And Isaac knew of the resurrection of the dead from the Torah, that all the dead are destined to be resurrected’ [Kunin page 229]
The death of Isaac (or the symbolic death of Isaac) is necessary in order to enable him to be symbolically transformed. The element of transformation or birth (the reverse of the sacrifice) is the structural center of the text, and, with the progressive denial of his physical parent, his spiritual parent comes to the fore. In Gen. 21: 1 (quoted at the start) the text suggests that God played an important role in Isaac’s birth: ‘the Lord did to Sarah as he had spoken. This creates the possibility that God was the parent rather than Abraham. [Kunin page 97]
But leaders born of Divine birth not only die and get re-born, they also suffer. Similar to other prophets (e.g. Hannah to Samuel as in Samuel I 2: 21) and rulers/saviors (c.f. David as illegitimate), Isaac’s birth is ridiculed by the neighbors and his parentage is questioned and a subject of gossip.
Yalkut Shemone 93 tells that Abraham gave a feast to celebrate Isaac’s birth. All the people were telling each other that Abraham and Sarah could not have been the parents, and that they must have picked Isaac up in the market. God puts a stop to this by making Sarah’s breasts overflow with milk to feed all the children present, yet they still talked of Abraham and Sarah’s age. So God made Isaac look exactly like Abraham so all could see that he was the father. [Kunin p.244]
As mentioned previously, the emphasis on both a barren mother and a impotent father make the Isaac story unique and worthy of Isaac’s paradigmatic position as the first JFB (Jew From Birth).
So Isaac and all subsequent leaders of the people of Israel has a divine birth that separates him from his natural parents, he is belittled, possibly persecuted, delegitemized and suffers and ultimately is killed as a burnt offering/atonement sacrifice only to be re-born at the hand of God (or his angels).
Kunin is to be complimented for the way he connects the symbolic structure of Isaacs’s birth to that of Abram, Sarai, Jacob and Joseph as well as Cain and Abel. (read the book…..) In so doing he reveals other patterns such as a rejection of the natural order of primogeniture, in which the elder is greater as opposed to the divine concept of choseness and covenant.
Israel is descended from people chosen by God rather than entitled by nature. This element is found throughout the text: Seth is Adam’s third son, Shem is Noah’s third son, Isaac is Abraham’s second son, and Moses is also a second son. This aspect of chosen descent is part of the logic by which Israel is distinguished from the nations…. [Kunin p 106]
Similarly, the biblical narrative favors the farmer and nomadic gatherer (Jacob – dweller in tents) over the hunter (Ishamael and Esau) and the city-dweller (Lot and Sodom) . Not that at the time the Bible was edited, or ever, were the Israelites really nomads, but from an aspirational perspective nature = entitlement = status and stasis – structure – natural law and divine = choseness = covenant = rebirth – reboot – artifice – culture.
In using divine as the opposite of ‘nature’ or, as discussed above, ‘natural birth’, there is also an association of divine with culture. The opposition suggested here is that the myth creates a dichotomy in which the other nations and their cultures are associated with nature and natural birth, while Israel and its culture is associated with culture and divine. Israelite myth, as a handmaiden of Israelite culture, validates Israelite culture as divine. [Kunin p. 117]
In my next post, we’ll explore how divine birth plays out in Christianity, how Christianity and Judaism exploited the same logical structure in different ways… and our debt to Christianity for preserving the structure of divine birth, sacrifice and resurrections so that we could rediscover in our earliest myths……
00
you shall not lie alone
parshat kedoshim
Speak unto all the congregation of the children of Israel, and say unto them: Ye shall be holy; for I the LORD your God am holy. (Leviticus 19: 2)
דַּבֵּר אֶל-כָּל-עֲדַת בְּנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל, וְאָמַרְתָּ אֲלֵהֶם–קְדֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ: כִּי קָדוֹשׁ, אֲנִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם
Chapter 19 of Leviticus is comparable to the Ten Commandments. Rav Hiyya explained that the reason it was to be read “unto all the congregation” is because most of the essential laws of the Torah can be derived from it. (Leviticus Rabba 24). In my humble opinion it is far superior to the Ten Commandments. As Everett Fox writes: “[It] is wide-ranging and rhetorically powerful. It extends holiness to virtually all areas of life – family, calendar, cult, business civil and criminal law, social relations, and sexuality.” (The Five Books of Moses, Everett Fox p. 600.)
What detracts from the breadth of vision however, is the emphasis in the preceding and following chapters (Leviticus 18, also read at the afternoon service of Yom Kippur, and chapter 20) which are fixated on sexual perversion of every kind.. and I mean every kind, including incest, bestiality and homosexuality.
I will argue below, that much of what the Torah detests about sexual perversion, has less to do with being puritanical and more to do with challenging God’s authority and rejecting our humanity. Stay with me…. It’s an interesting ride…
—————————-
The Hebrew Bible can be summarized as a rejection of Idolatry and an embrace of the concept that God is King. No human or human-creation is divine.
In the first account in Chapter 1 of Genesis, Adam was created God-like, in the image of God, as a unitary being and as such did not need to procreate… or at least did not need a mate to procreate. God as we know… is eternal and does not need to procreate. When we first meet Adam… either does he.
In Genesis 1:27 we read: “And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.”
וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים אֶת-הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ, בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ: זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה, בָּרָא אֹתָם
How does one explain the apparent contradiction of Man being created as a singular being… like God and God creating the human male and female? The Midrash cited by the classical commentators, Rashi and Ibn Ezra, explains these words in the following manner: The Adam was created as an androgynous being with two sides, male and female; moreover, these two sides were later separated in order to form two separate beings – man and woman (Genesis Rabbah 8:1). The tradition that the first human being was created as an androgynous being is also cited in the Talmud (Berochot 61a, Eruvin 18a).
How man procreates defines whether he is an earthly analog to God…or whether he, unlike God, cannot replicate Himself and is in need of an “other”.
An understanding of this premise explains the low Biblical regard of the divine right of kings and related incestual inbreeding as well as ritualistic bestiality, temple prostitution and homosexuality all of which are laid out in detail in Leviticus 18 and 20.
In this context one can understand Genesis 2:18 “And the Lord God said: It is not good that the man should be alone: I will make a help meet for him.” Rashi quotes Genesis Rabba: “So that people should not say that there are two authorities. The Holy One Blessed Be He among the heavenly beings is single, and has no mate, and the other one, among earthly beings has no mate.”
שלא יאמרו שתי רשויות הן הקב”ה יחיד בעליונים ואין לו זוג, וזה יחיד בתחתונים ואין לו זוג
The message here is that were a human who intended to have a family were to publicly stay celibate, or claim sexual self-sufficientcy and mate with a being with which he cannot biologically reproduce; such as an animal, a goddess or a human of the same sex.. he is in an ancient Near Eastern way mimicking the divine, claiming divinity and thereby challenging God.
This to my mind is the meaning of Leviticus 18-22:
Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination.
וְאֶת-זָכָר–לֹא תִשְׁכַּב, מִשְׁכְּבֵי אִשָּׁה: תּוֹעֵבָה, הִוא
To claim that one can have a child, without the need of the other sex, is to claim divinity…. and therefore an abomination.
In Genesis, a few verses after woman has been created from Adam’s rib, the Bible writes: “And the man said: This now, bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh, to this shall be called Woman, because out of Man was this one taken.” Rashi is struck by “this now” and writes: “This teaches that Adam came to [lit. came unto – had sex with] each animal and beast in quest of a mate and he found no satisfaction in them (Babylonian Talmud, Yebamoth 63a).
מלמד שבא אדם על כל בהמה וחיה ולא נתקררה דעתו בהם עד שבא על חוה
“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh” Genesis 2:24 Rashi comments: “The Holy Spirit says this to forbid to the “children of Noah” unchaste behavior (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 57b)”
רוח הקודש אומרת כן,לאסור על בני נח את העריות
In other words, the source of unchaste sexual behavior (“Arayot” in Hebrew) is when a man does not leave his father and mother… sister, brother etc. but mates with them! In the ancient world, inbreeding is reproduction without the need for another being outside of one’s gene pool and is to showcase a divine union which by the laws of nature does not support procreation. It is forbidden because it challenges the Godhead.
So how did the next generation procreate with such a small gene pool? The most straightforward response, is that just as Adam had no choice but to mate with Eve.. who was after all, flesh of his flesh… so too Cain had to mate with a sister.
In Leviticus 20:17 the Bible writes: “And if a man shall take his sister, his father’s daughter or his mother’s daughter, and see her nakedness, and she see his nakedness, it is a shameful thing (Hebrew: “Chesed).
וְאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר-יִקַּח אֶת-אֲחֹתוֹ בַּת-אָבִיו אוֹ בַת-אִמּוֹ וְרָאָה אֶת-עֶרְוָתָהּ וְהִיא-תִרְאֶה אֶת-עֶרְוָתוֹ, חֶסֶד הוּא–וְנִכְרְתוּ, לְעֵינֵי בְּנֵי עַמָּם; עֶרְוַת אֲחֹתוֹ גִּלָּה, עֲוֹנוֹ יִשָּׂא
Rashi comments: it is a disgraceful act: The Aramaic term for “disgrace” is חִסוּדָא. – [see Onkelos on Gen. 34:14] Its Midrashic interpretation, however, is: If you [object and] say, “But Cain married his sister!” [the answer is:] the Omnipresent [in permitting this marriage,] performed an act of kindness (חֶסֶד), to build His world through him, as it is said: “the world is built on kindness (חֶסֶד) ” (Ps. 89:3). – [Torath Kohanim 20:116] Olam Chesed Yibaneh
לשון ארמי חרפה (בראשית לד יד) חסודא. ומדרשו אם תאמר קין נשא אחותו, חסד עשה המקום לבנות עולמו ממנו, שנאמר (תהלים פט ג) עולם חסד יבנה
One wonders… whether both explanations complement each other… “the world is built on shame….
In any case, the biblical premise remains… inbreeding is a rejection of God and a rejection of God’s role as man’s only ruler. Royals want to mix and re-mix their blood to protect their superior “blue” blood and to justify the subjugation of the commoner and stranger. God wants us, wherever possible, to leave our father and mother and create our bloodline with our fellow human commoners.
The biblical laws are talking about procreation… not love and relationships….
Returning with this new understanding of the sexual tension between Divine Royal inbreeding on the one hand and the alternative of leaving one’s gene pool and loving the “other”.. we can now make sense of the exhausting descriptions and proscriptions against prohibited sexual activity in Leviticus 18 -20…
The Biblical sense of Kedusha-Holiness is truly lyrical. God exhorts his people not to try to be holy like He is holy in the Ancient Near Eastern sense that man should compete with God by appointing human gods as leaders, and by building castes and tribes excluded from a holy blood lineage. Rather the Biblical invitation to be Holy as God is Holy is to act like God, in his most human form… Mah hu rachum, af ata rachum… Just as He is merciful, so shall you be merciful (Tractate Shabbat 133b and Rambam, Hilchot Dayot) … The seamless transistions between the ethical and ritual is an invitation to imitate God… Just as He is merciful and embraces the stranger and the common wage earner and just as He is honorable in business dealings.. so should you too …. It is a rejection of the stratification of divine rulers and common subjects.
The implications for the contemporary discussion regarding same sex marriage and the Hebrew Bible are many.
As for as I’m concerned the message is simple.
It’s not good for a human to be alone…. Not only because we need the love of another, but because living alone is a challenge to the Divine and therefore a rejection of our humanity.
לֹא-טוֹב הֱיוֹת הָאָדָם לְבַדּוֹ
It is also pretty clear to me that our personal world is built both on kindness and shame. Undeserved kindness provided to us and shame born of the crooked timber of humanity… the world is built on Hesed.
עולם חסד יבנה
To claim that we are a world unto ourselves is not only selfish but it is a challenge to God and a denial of our humanity.
The illicit relationships listed in Leviticus have less to do with perverse sexual morays and everything to do with challenging God’s divinity and denying our own humanity.
You shall not lie alone…..
1 Comment
Filed under Bible, divine birth, Hebrew, homosexuality, immaculate conception, Judaism, Religion, social commentary