Bereshit
Here's the drash from Saturday. Stupid blogger doesn't cut and paste italics, so please ignore anything that should be italicized.
As a reward for coordinating the d’vrei Torah for the Rose Crown Minyan these past few years, I decided to take the plum parshat Bereshit for myself this time around. Too late, I realized that this kick-back is less like having first draft pick and more like directing Hamlet. Performing for an audience that arrives with preconceptions set in school or dozens of previous performances with which to compare, my Hamlet is pretty much fated to be mediocre at best. Plus, there is the question of what to cut, since a four hour drash would warrant the co-chairs stripping me of my duties. Unlike dazzling with mere competence in discussing the Titus Andronicus parsha of, say, Tazria, the stories in Bereshit form the firmament beneath our culture and our consciousness, underpinning not just Judaism but the foundations of Western culture as well. The Torah opens with a wide lens, an establishing shot encompassing all of humanity, before zooming in on the family romance of the people Israel. In this prehistory, the Torah is not concerned with individual characters so much as with the archetypes of mankind, the essential problems of being human.
When the world was created, God looked upon Creation and declared everything made in the previous six days very good. By the end of the parsha, God sees how great man’s wickedness has become and how every plan devised by man’s mind was all evil, all the time. The work of God was very good, yet the imaginings of man were very wicked: herein lies the paradox of being made in God’s image.
On the sixth day, God first makes the creatures of the earth and declares the feat jolly good. Later that day in a separate act of creation God continues on to make animals with really big heads and opposable thumbs. God does not say that this culminating creation is good. Creation as a whole is very good, humans in and of themselves are not. Of this omission, Ramban says that if man desires to take the good path and be righteous he is free to do so, if the evil one and be wicked he is free to do so. The Creator does not preordain man to be good or bad. We are singled out from the beasties beneath us with the good of our species placed in our own hands. In a drash way back I quoted the fundamental question, “Why do we have to have evil?” from the movie Time Bandits. The Supreme Being’s answer of, “Ah, I think it has something to do with free will,” bears repeating. With free will there comes responsibility and the opportunity to make our own good. Or our own evil.
Since my daughter was born in August I have spent a lot of time thinking about evil. Nursing a newborn, I made the startling discovery that book reading is an activity requiring one or both hands, hands now otherwise occupied. I would like to say that I spend this sedentary time pondering the nature of evil as I lovingly gaze upon my daughter’s innocent visage, like a Renaissance Madonna. Truthfully, evil is on my mind as I have taken Yelena’s frequent feedings as an opportunity to watch a lot Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I have consumed so much Buffy that my husband doubted this d’var Torah would get written.) Buffy does spend a considerable amount of time standing against vampires, demons and the forces of darkness, but the true appeal of the show lies not in watching Buffy kick the butt of the monster of the week, but in watching Buffy and the Scooby Gang choose between shades of gray and wrestle their yetzer ha-ra and yetzer ha-tov. It is a bit angst-ridden, but so is the business of our everyday, non-super hero lives.
We did not start out in this difficult place where tilling the soil of options was a way of life. A garden is self-contained, requiring minimal effort to maintain harmony and keep nature, human nature, at bay. In Eden there was only one true choice to make: whether to follow or disobey the sole injunction of God, to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. This tree, and the subsequent expulsion from the garden, bends under the weight of the allegorizing heaped upon it, but what interests me here is that tasting its fruit unlocks the garden gates so the essence of what it means to be human comes rushing in.
Christianity posits this fall from our initial God-given state of grace as the Original Sin, the act that brought evil into this world. But the fruit is not the portal that is also a key that let evil into the world, like Pandora’s box. It is the vehicle through which we can ascend to grace by our own merit. This knowledge may get in the way of easy living, yet it makes life worth living, saving the unexamined life for the olam haba. In creating humankind, God breathed the nishmat hayyim, the breath of life, into our nostrils, animating us and making us distinct from all other life on earth. By taking the fruit into our own mouths we complete God’s work in making us fully realized autonomous beings.
Eve and Adam’s action predates sin for, like a child younger than thirteen, how could they have committed evil before they knew what evil was? Refraining from snacking on the fruit of knowledge would have made Adam and Eve obedient and allowed them to live the life of leisure, but would it have made them good? Rabbinic tradition viewed the serpent as the evil inclination embodied, persuading Eve that resistance is futile, that to not eat from the tree would go against nature. I am going to side with the snake. Being made in God’s image we are compelled to eat the fruit, to make us more like our Maker. Once we disobey and the fruit of knowledge is tasted, God says “man has become like one of us, knowing good and bad.” Possessing moral discrimination we are one step closer to our likeness of God, even if it gets us expelled from the garden. Given the menu, we ordered from the tree of knowledge, chancing immorality, over the Edenic bliss promised by the tree of immortality.
This is the act that made us fully human, propelling our kind out of the garden of innocence into the increasingly rough terrain of knowledge and accountability. Knowing may not make life easier – take university-educated Hamlet agonizing over his place in this mortal coil – but knowing evil does not mean being evil. To know both good and evil implies a constant state of flux, of movement between two poles, a ceaseless deliberation. But knowing evil is not just having a point of contrast to good, like black stripes in a design making the whites look whiter.
The Talmud instructs us to hold the yetzer ha-ra off with the left hand and draw him nigh with the right, moral push and pull, a tug-of-war within ourselves implying that the yetzer ha-ra is an essential part of our being. A midrash asks, “Can the evil impulse be good?” answering that without this impulse no man would build a house, take a wife or beget children. When we initiate we imitate our Creator, and any innovation or act of creation requires an impetus. Sometime a spark may come from a less than pure motive, but it is how the action is governed by our conscience that determines morality. Pirkei Avot teaches that he who masters the urge to sin is strong; a penitent is certainly stronger, and wiser, than one who was never tempted in the first place. Buffy feels the pull of the dark and is attracted to it; not only is she a stronger slayer for her mastery of it but from the experience of understanding its temptations. There is more to this than simply you can’t have one without the other – it is like Saul Below wrote in the opening paragraph of The Adventures of Augie March, “There is no finesse or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.” Ignorance of evil is not bliss, it is not equivalent to good. Without knowledge of evil there can be no choosing good, no intentionality.
For the generation after Eden the temptation to evil is no longer external, incarnate in a serpent, but digested, internalized. Once our primogenitors yield to temptation and gain cognizance, they know enough to be very afraid. Their newfound knowledge of right and wrong makes them feel shamed, stripped naked before the God whose edict they violated. They want to flee, to hide from themselves. They feel remorse, recognizing the difference between the yetzer ha-ra and the yetzer ha-tov. Their eldest son does not.
Cain does not deliberate with his evil impulse, he does not let his desires marinate, so it devours him. Whereas his brother offers a sacrifice with a full heart, Cain only goes through the outward motions, he skims the surface of meaning. God offers Cain another chance, warning him that “sin couches at the door, its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.” Cain has an opportunity to repent and mend his ways but, according to Rashi, Cain is not concerned with remedying what was certainly in his power to remedy. Rather than taking the time and effort to study and make up the test, Cain chooses to get angry, to bypass his knowledge of good and evil and proceed with his rank offense that, in the words of Shakespeare, “smells to heaven and hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, a brother’s murder.”
Cain refuses to account for his initial error of empty sacrifice, an offering echoing Claudius’ “Words without thoughts to heaven never go.” Rather than digging through his soul and nipping its poison in the bud, he allows his yetzer ha-ra to spread like a weed. He refuses to face the demon at the threshold, thus delivering himself to the demon’s desire. In his work entitled Good and Evil, Buber writes that the intensification of Cain’s indecision is a decision to evil. In the vortex of his indecision, Cain strikes out at the point of greatest provocation and least resistance, his brother.
Unlike Claudius who, faced with the mirror of his crime in The Mousetrap, wrangles with his conscience and debates repentance, the first murderer strikes out at God as well and disclaims responsibility by asking, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” a question that implies its answer. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai claims with this Cain says, “You are God. You have created man. It is your task to watch him, not mine.” Cain tries to pass the buck to an omniscient God, asking if God’s inquiry after Abel’s whereabouts is merely rhetorical, then why did God not step in and prevent this murder? Where is God in the hour of evil? By asking this question Cain acknowledges a moral authority, that there is someone to whom man must answer. God’s failure to answer this question probably has something to do with freewill.
When the world was created, God looked upon Creation and declared everything made in the previous six days very good. By the end of the parsha, God sees how great man’s wickedness has become and how every plan devised by man’s mind was all evil, all the time. The work of God was very good, yet the imaginings of man were very wicked: herein lies the paradox of being made in God’s image.
On the sixth day, God first makes the creatures of the earth and declares the feat jolly good. Later that day in a separate act of creation God continues on to make animals with really big heads and opposable thumbs. God does not say that this culminating creation is good. Creation as a whole is very good, humans in and of themselves are not. Of this omission, Ramban says that if man desires to take the good path and be righteous he is free to do so, if the evil one and be wicked he is free to do so. The Creator does not preordain man to be good or bad. We are singled out from the beasties beneath us with the good of our species placed in our own hands. In a drash way back I quoted the fundamental question, “Why do we have to have evil?” from the movie Time Bandits. The Supreme Being’s answer of, “Ah, I think it has something to do with free will,” bears repeating. With free will there comes responsibility and the opportunity to make our own good. Or our own evil.
Since my daughter was born in August I have spent a lot of time thinking about evil. Nursing a newborn, I made the startling discovery that book reading is an activity requiring one or both hands, hands now otherwise occupied. I would like to say that I spend this sedentary time pondering the nature of evil as I lovingly gaze upon my daughter’s innocent visage, like a Renaissance Madonna. Truthfully, evil is on my mind as I have taken Yelena’s frequent feedings as an opportunity to watch a lot Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I have consumed so much Buffy that my husband doubted this d’var Torah would get written.) Buffy does spend a considerable amount of time standing against vampires, demons and the forces of darkness, but the true appeal of the show lies not in watching Buffy kick the butt of the monster of the week, but in watching Buffy and the Scooby Gang choose between shades of gray and wrestle their yetzer ha-ra and yetzer ha-tov. It is a bit angst-ridden, but so is the business of our everyday, non-super hero lives.
We did not start out in this difficult place where tilling the soil of options was a way of life. A garden is self-contained, requiring minimal effort to maintain harmony and keep nature, human nature, at bay. In Eden there was only one true choice to make: whether to follow or disobey the sole injunction of God, to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. This tree, and the subsequent expulsion from the garden, bends under the weight of the allegorizing heaped upon it, but what interests me here is that tasting its fruit unlocks the garden gates so the essence of what it means to be human comes rushing in.
Christianity posits this fall from our initial God-given state of grace as the Original Sin, the act that brought evil into this world. But the fruit is not the portal that is also a key that let evil into the world, like Pandora’s box. It is the vehicle through which we can ascend to grace by our own merit. This knowledge may get in the way of easy living, yet it makes life worth living, saving the unexamined life for the olam haba. In creating humankind, God breathed the nishmat hayyim, the breath of life, into our nostrils, animating us and making us distinct from all other life on earth. By taking the fruit into our own mouths we complete God’s work in making us fully realized autonomous beings.
Eve and Adam’s action predates sin for, like a child younger than thirteen, how could they have committed evil before they knew what evil was? Refraining from snacking on the fruit of knowledge would have made Adam and Eve obedient and allowed them to live the life of leisure, but would it have made them good? Rabbinic tradition viewed the serpent as the evil inclination embodied, persuading Eve that resistance is futile, that to not eat from the tree would go against nature. I am going to side with the snake. Being made in God’s image we are compelled to eat the fruit, to make us more like our Maker. Once we disobey and the fruit of knowledge is tasted, God says “man has become like one of us, knowing good and bad.” Possessing moral discrimination we are one step closer to our likeness of God, even if it gets us expelled from the garden. Given the menu, we ordered from the tree of knowledge, chancing immorality, over the Edenic bliss promised by the tree of immortality.
This is the act that made us fully human, propelling our kind out of the garden of innocence into the increasingly rough terrain of knowledge and accountability. Knowing may not make life easier – take university-educated Hamlet agonizing over his place in this mortal coil – but knowing evil does not mean being evil. To know both good and evil implies a constant state of flux, of movement between two poles, a ceaseless deliberation. But knowing evil is not just having a point of contrast to good, like black stripes in a design making the whites look whiter.
The Talmud instructs us to hold the yetzer ha-ra off with the left hand and draw him nigh with the right, moral push and pull, a tug-of-war within ourselves implying that the yetzer ha-ra is an essential part of our being. A midrash asks, “Can the evil impulse be good?” answering that without this impulse no man would build a house, take a wife or beget children. When we initiate we imitate our Creator, and any innovation or act of creation requires an impetus. Sometime a spark may come from a less than pure motive, but it is how the action is governed by our conscience that determines morality. Pirkei Avot teaches that he who masters the urge to sin is strong; a penitent is certainly stronger, and wiser, than one who was never tempted in the first place. Buffy feels the pull of the dark and is attracted to it; not only is she a stronger slayer for her mastery of it but from the experience of understanding its temptations. There is more to this than simply you can’t have one without the other – it is like Saul Below wrote in the opening paragraph of The Adventures of Augie March, “There is no finesse or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.” Ignorance of evil is not bliss, it is not equivalent to good. Without knowledge of evil there can be no choosing good, no intentionality.
For the generation after Eden the temptation to evil is no longer external, incarnate in a serpent, but digested, internalized. Once our primogenitors yield to temptation and gain cognizance, they know enough to be very afraid. Their newfound knowledge of right and wrong makes them feel shamed, stripped naked before the God whose edict they violated. They want to flee, to hide from themselves. They feel remorse, recognizing the difference between the yetzer ha-ra and the yetzer ha-tov. Their eldest son does not.
Cain does not deliberate with his evil impulse, he does not let his desires marinate, so it devours him. Whereas his brother offers a sacrifice with a full heart, Cain only goes through the outward motions, he skims the surface of meaning. God offers Cain another chance, warning him that “sin couches at the door, its urge is toward you, yet you can be its master.” Cain has an opportunity to repent and mend his ways but, according to Rashi, Cain is not concerned with remedying what was certainly in his power to remedy. Rather than taking the time and effort to study and make up the test, Cain chooses to get angry, to bypass his knowledge of good and evil and proceed with his rank offense that, in the words of Shakespeare, “smells to heaven and hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, a brother’s murder.”
Cain refuses to account for his initial error of empty sacrifice, an offering echoing Claudius’ “Words without thoughts to heaven never go.” Rather than digging through his soul and nipping its poison in the bud, he allows his yetzer ha-ra to spread like a weed. He refuses to face the demon at the threshold, thus delivering himself to the demon’s desire. In his work entitled Good and Evil, Buber writes that the intensification of Cain’s indecision is a decision to evil. In the vortex of his indecision, Cain strikes out at the point of greatest provocation and least resistance, his brother.
Unlike Claudius who, faced with the mirror of his crime in The Mousetrap, wrangles with his conscience and debates repentance, the first murderer strikes out at God as well and disclaims responsibility by asking, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” a question that implies its answer. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai claims with this Cain says, “You are God. You have created man. It is your task to watch him, not mine.” Cain tries to pass the buck to an omniscient God, asking if God’s inquiry after Abel’s whereabouts is merely rhetorical, then why did God not step in and prevent this murder? Where is God in the hour of evil? By asking this question Cain acknowledges a moral authority, that there is someone to whom man must answer. God’s failure to answer this question probably has something to do with freewill.
Labels: d'var
posted by Mi at 5:57 PM
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