#exegesis

[specialprovisionforkira]

Death Note / Volume One Analysis

CHAPTER ONE: BOREDOM

CHAPTER TWO: L

CHAPTER THREE: FAMILY

CHAPTER FOUR: CURRENT

CHAPTER FIVE: EYEBALLS

CHAPTER SIX: MANIPULATION

CHAPTER SEVEN: TARGET

NEXT: VOLUME TWO ->

MASTERLIST

[griefasagarden]

leila chatti, exegesis, deluge

ID: "I've known men but never a god / that bled and lived. But I did." End ID

[la-chacha-gris]

DAVID LYNCH:

"I’m just, you know, kind of happy in the doing of things. Even just having a great cup of coffee is happiness. Getting an idea, or realizing an idea. Working on a painting…working on a piece of sculpture, working on a film. One thing I noticed is that many of us, we do what we call work for a goal. For a result. And in the doing, it’s not that much happiness. And yet that’s our life going by. If you’re transcending every day, building up that happiness, it eventually comes to: it doesn’t matter what your work is. You just get happy in the work. You get happy in the little things and the big things. And if the result isn’t what you dreamed of, it doesn’t kill you, if you enjoyed the doing of it. It’s important that we enjoy the doing of our life."

Creation and gratitude for life

Creación y gratitud con la vida

"Simplemente, sabes, soy un poco feliz haciendo cosas. Incluso el simple hecho de tomar una buena taza de café es felicidad. Obtener una idea, o realizarla. Trabajando en un cuadro... en una escultura, o en una película. Una cosa que noté es que muchos hacemos lo que llamamos trabajo por un objetivo. Por un resultado. Y al hacerlo, no es tanta felicidad. Y, sin embargo, así es nuestra vida. Si estás trascendiendo todos los días, construyendo esa felicidad, eventualmente llega a: no importa cuál sea tu trabajo. Simplemente te pones feliz en el trabajo. Te haces feliz en las pequeñas cosas y en las grandes. Y si el resultado no es el que soñaste, no te mata, si disfrutaste haciéndolo. Es importante que disfrutemos de lo que hacemos en nuestra vida".

David Lynch was a very special guy. I know that bringing you these things causes surprise and cringe, inoculated as you are against spiritual messages for everyday life. You might say it's easy to give them when you dedicate yourself to your vocation to earn a living, but we have little patience when you've spent the morning erasing underlines in library books left by young vandals. But don't let the prosaic and infatuation blind you…

David Lynch era un tipo muy especial. Ya sé que traeros estas cosas causa extrañeza y cringe, vacunados como estáis contra mensajes espirituales para lo diario. Diréis que es fácil darlos cuando te dedicas a tu vocación para ganarte la vida, pero poca paciencia tenemos cuando has pasado la mañana borrando subrayados en libros de la biblio que dejaron jóvenes vándalos. Pero no dejéis que lo prosaico y la insatisfacción te cieguen…

This may remind you of the "to be happy, you don't need to do what you want, but to love what you do." And I'm wasting erasers today because people don't respect school supplies, BUT if Lynch created something so special, it was because he reconciled his meditation with the search for ideas of powerful resonance, which he then found a place for (and meaning, which he doesn't usually reveal) in his projects. Lynch wasn't a cowardly spiritual coach, and since he had a unique style, his own advice would be of some use to him before giving it. That's why I always pay attention to his words.

Puede recordaos esto al 'para ser feliz no hace falta hacer lo que quieras, sino querer lo que haces'. Y yo hoy gastando gomas de borrar porque la gente no respeta material escolar, PERO si Lynch creaba tan especial fue por conciliar su meditación con la búsqueda de ideas de poderosa resonancia a las que luego buscar lugar (y significado que no suele revelar) en sus proyectos. Lynch no se dedicaba a coaching espiritual cobrando y, dado que tenía un estilo único, de algo le servirían a él sus propios consejos antes de darlos. Por eso siempre presto atención a sus palabras.

Reading his book about ideas in his work carefully, we realize that for him, his true golden age of creativity begins when he overcomes being constantly angry over frustrations related to the author, budget, or everyday life. He called himself an unpleasant person back then, someone who poisoned his family with his bad manners and tantrums, so he attended meditation workshops precisely to avoid the latter, following the advice of others.

Leyendo con atención su libro sobre las ideas en su trabajo, nos damos cuenta que para él su verdadera edad dorada en cuanto creatividad empieza cuando supera el estar enfadado continuamente por frustraciones autorales, presupuestarias o del día a día. Se decía persona desagradable entonces, alguien que envenenaba a los suyos con sus malos modos y rabietas, por lo que fue a talleres de meditación precisamente para evitar esto último siguiendo consejo ajeno.

Lynch doesn't bother to write an autobiography and doesn't believe the author is important, but rather the works. He even tells us that being angry weighs on us and robs us, that anger monopolizing our thoughts keeps us too distracted to notice the flashes of small, valuable ideas swimming deep in our minds. But aren't emotions valuable to art? Yes and no. The sadness and pain of loss or depression prevent you from creating anything, according to Lynch, and the myth of the tortured author comes from the fact that, if he overcomes it, he's left with something learned that he can share from the passage of that devastating torrent of the soul. More important than emotions is knowing how to work (describe, inspire, distill, and produce) feelings, and the authentic artist needs serenity to be able to understand them and capture valuable ideas when they appear. For him, creating isn't so much an explosion or a hijacking of inspiration as knowing how to wait, prepared on the shore, to catch those little fish that rarely appear.

Lynch no se toma la molestia de hacer una autobiografía y no cree importante al autor sino a las obras. Nos llega a contar que estar enfadado pesa y te roba, la ira monopolizando nuestros pensamientos nos mantiene demasiado distraídos para notar los destellos de pequeñas ideas valiosas nadando profundamente en nuestra mente. Pero ¿no son las emociones valiosas para el arte? Sí y no. La tristeza y dolor de la pérdida o la depresión no te dejan crear nada según Lynch, y el mito del autor torturado viene de que este si lo supera queda con algo aprendido que puede contar del paso de ese torrente devastador del alma. Más importantes que las emociones es saber trabajar (describir, inspirar, destilar y producir) sentimientos, y el artista auténtico necesita serenidad para poder comprenderlos y atrapar las ideas valiosas cuando aparezcan. Crear para él no es tanto una explosión, ni secuestro por la inspiración como el saber esperar preparado en la orilla para pescar esos pececitos que aparecen poco.

But what remains when you learn not to feed the anger that can run wild? Serenity to work with attention and care. Then you discover gratitude for a good idea, a gift received. Observing the world without the noise inside us, you understand the beauty of a clear night, how good coffee is, and a calm happiness for being alive, able to find and experience so much beauty around you. You find quotes from him speaking like a saint or a hermit he never was, but he's just a person at peace with himself who celebrates life by creating, or who appreciates life thanks to learning to create. What difference does it make whether it's one or the other when you feel full and fertile with ideas? The fool always confuses the simple teachings of the wise with nonsense, because living and creating is simpler than we believe, blinded, confused, and unbridled by the complications we create for ourselves.

Pero ¿Qué queda cuando aprendes a no alimentar ira que puede desbocarte? Serenidad para trabajar con atención y cuidado. Entonces descubres la gratitud por una buena idea siendo un regalo recibido. Observando ya el mundo sin ruido en nuestros adentros, comprendes lo bonito de una noche despejada, lo bueno que está el café y una calmada felicidad por estar vivo pudiendo encontrar y experimentar tanta belleza a tu alrededor. Encontréis citas de él hablando como un santo o un ermitaño que nunca fue, pero solo es una persona en paz consigo misma que celebra vida creando, o que aprecia la vida gracias a aprender a crear ¿Qué más da que sea una cosa u otra cuando te sientes pleno y fértil de ideas? El necio siempre confunde las sencillas enseñanzas del sabio con tonterías, porque vivir y crear es más sencillo que como creemos, cegados, confundidos y desbocados por las complicaciones para ello que nosotros mismos nos creamos.

M

[yisraelthebarregesh]

Given his origin, satan should align himself with Light, Good, Virtue, and Truth, since his primary function, as we have seen, is to detect and expose the slightest defects in these qualities. However, it is impossible to consider satan as an exclusively "luminous" figure—his behavior contradicts this too profoundly. [...]

Jesus, in contrast, consistently belongs to the side of Light. This is emphasized particularly actively in the Gospel of John: Jesus is the true Light, which enlightens every person (John 1:9). John the Baptist, in turn, was not the light, but was sent to bear witness to the Light (John 1:8). A "witness to the Light" is an apt functional description of the Morning Star, i.e., the planet Venus. Venus is very close to the Sun, so it appears in the eastern sky before sunrise, and in the western sky after sunset. In the latter case, it was called Hesperus in Greek, and in Latin by the similar words Vesper and Hesperus. Venus, when it appears in the morning, was called Phosphorus or Eosphorus in Greek, and in Latin — Lucifer; in both languages, these words mean "Light-Bringer." In other words, Lucifer is not the light itself, but heralds the light. Consequently, one could suppose that the best candidate for the role of a being likened to the Morning Star is John the Baptist.

But, as we saw when discussing the Gospel of Luke, the Baptist seems to be defined as a herald of the "pre-Luciferan period," whereas Lucifer is the Messiah himself. Zechariah says of the infant John:

"And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go on before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will visit us from on high to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace." (Luke 1:76-79)

Above, I translated "the rising sun" (Anatole) as "the star that heralds the day." But it turns out that Anatole not only heralds the light but also gives light, meaning it can be the rising sun itself.

On the other hand, Anatole might not be related to the dawn and the sun, but simply to the east. In the Gospel of Matthew, the Magi come apo Anatolon, that is, from the east—the direction of not only the sunrise but also the rising of stars. They are seeking the King of the Jews, for they saw his star "in the east" (Matt. 2:2). The appearance of such a star was one of the signs of the Messiah in Balaam's prophecy: "A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out of Israel. He will crush the foreheads of Moab." (Num. 24:17)

In the Book of Revelation, the functions of Lucifer are more definitively ascribed to Jesus, although in the first passage this is less obvious, as Jesus does not "give the Morning Star" but promises it as a gift. Relaying the message of the Son of Man to his followers in the church of Thyatira, and denouncing the so-called "deep things of satan" (Rev. 2:24), John says:

"To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations... I will also give that one the Morning Star. Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches." (Rev. 2:26-29)

Some commentators assure us that the Morning Star is Christ himself, since, as we will see later in Revelation, Jesus defines himself in this very way. But perhaps a different logic should be applied here. If we accept that the Morning Star is Christ, then in the quoted passage, Christ is effectively saying: "I, Jesus, give you Jesus." A much more natural reading in this context would be: "I give you myself as the Morning Star."

An alternative explanation is to view this passage in the spirit of Jesus' speech during the Last Supper in the Gospel of John, where He says He will send His Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, the Advocate (Paraclete). Supporting this interpretation is the fact that in Revelation, the Son of Man continually mentions the Spirit: "Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches" (Rev. 2:29). Thus, His message is presented as the true message of the Spirit, addressed not only to the church in Thyatira but to all the churches.

The Book of Revelation concludes with a description of the New Jerusalem, where there will be no more night. "There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever." (Rev. 22:5) Then, the narration in John's voice shifts to the direct speech of the One who revealed these things to him, and once again, for the third time in Revelation, the words of Jesus sound forth, unaccompanied by any introductory remarks:

"I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star." (Rev. 22:16)

This is tantamount to the declaration: "I, Jesus, am Lucifer." And since the Morning Star is called "bright" (Lampos), it is not only the herald of the Light but is itself the Light.

Finally, similar imagery is used in the Second Epistle of Peter—presumably the latest book included in the New Testament. The author, Pseudo-Peter, states that he heard the voice of God on the Mount of Transfiguration: "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased" (2 Peter 1:17-18), and says that these words of God confirm the words of prophecy. He then continues:

"...And you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the Morning Star [Lucifer] rises in your hearts..." (2 Peter 1:19)

The likely meaning of this image is that the prophets provide only a faint light until Jesus comes in the fullness of Light. The imagery is introduced somewhat awkwardly, as it suggests that the Morning Star has already risen in the hearts of faithful Christians, replacing the fainter lamps. On the other hand, the metaphor is quite realistic, as it states that dawn will precede the rising of the Morning Star, though it doesn't emphasize that the light of dawn appears first, naturally followed by the light of the sun.

Conclusion: Lucifer, that is, the Morning Star (the planet Venus at the moment it appears at dawn and seems the brightest of the stars), is a consistently positive image with firm associations to Jesus the Messiah.

— Satan: a biography by Henry Ansgar Kelly

[anxiouswizardart]

The Suffering of Job

For context, I drew this while researching the ethics of disability and, more broadly, marginalisation for my thesis.

At present, Western academia has an unreflective bias towards a northern protestant ethos, and so its ethical assumptions are closely associated with ideas of utility and legalism. This means they are often unable to incorporate either the disabled or disenfranchised into their frameworks without presenting them as the other; moral subjects whose agency and value are overlooked. Even virtue ethics, which I personally ascribe to, is often unable to prevent itself from creating hierarchies of value, which lead to similar problems of parternalism and dehumanisation.

I was motivated to focus on this area because I was nolonger comfortable having my own experience and worth dictated to me by those whose experience is one of manifest moral privilege, and who seem incapable of internalising the inherent worth of the marginalised or acknowledge the dependency which is inherent to the human experience.

The figure of Job is important to me in this as he represents a paradigmatic case of one who is divorced from those aspects of himself which appear to give meaning and value to his life, and so is forced into a choice. Either he acknowledges the inherent worth of his humanity or he despairs.

He does not approach this issue with passivity or pious fatalism, but rages against the injustice of his experience; an injustice made worse by social exclusion and the pretentious moralising of his "friends".

Job does, however, refuse to accept that his misfortune is somehow a cosmic punishment, and he refuses to diminish himself because of the privation he experiences.

The book of Job can be read a number of ways, but, I would argue, it is, at its heart a meditation on the inherent value of human life in a way which is not dependent on external goods or social capital.

[erik-even-gayer]

Look, if those exegesis guys get to find whatever they want in the text, so do the rest of us.

[nonstandardrepertoire]

Parashat Vəzot haBərakhah: יִשְׂרָאֵל | yisra’eil

I believe the task that we have as humans in the present moment is to become more comfortable navigating a world of ambiguity and contradiction. To learn how to hold at the same time explanations that pull in alternate directions, without being held ourselves. We must cultivate our ability to stay nimble, to learn broadly, to tangle with sources working at cross purposes. To wrestle, as it were, with the world, and to win, or at least bring it to a stalemate.

Hey, so: How does the Torah end?

Probably fewer people could quote any text here than would be able to offer a rough translation of the beginning, but you probably wouldn’t have to search too long and hard at a post-service oneg to find someone who could tell you that the Torah ends with a eulogy. Mosheh dies and is buried in an unknown place, and then we’re told that there was never again a prophet like him, a guy who talked with G-d face to face and who displayed the miracles of the Exodus לְעֵינֵ֖י כׇּל־יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ | lə’einei kol yisra’eil | “to the eyes of all Yisra’eil” (Dəvarim 34:12). And that’s it, that’s the very last word of the very last of the five books of Moses.

Yisra’eil is, of course, the Biblical name for the group that would ultimately become the Jewish people, and it comes, of course, from the patriarch Ya’aqov, who is granted the name Yisra’eil in addition to his birth name way back in Bəreishit 32:29 after wrestling with a mysterious being. In that earlier passage, the mysterious figure — conventionally read as an angel, tho the text itself doesn’t make that claim explicitly — explains the new name by telling Ya’aqov/Yisra’eil כִּי־שָׂרִ֧יתָ עִם־אֱלֹקִ֛ים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁ֖ים וַתּוּכָֽל׃ | ki saríta im elo[q]im və’im anashim vatukhal. | “you have wrestled with G-d and with humans and you have prevailed.”. Riffing on the verb sarah [a], this explanation reads the name as something like “he wrestles with G-d”.

[a] Etymologically unrelated to the name of the matriarch Sarah, which means “princess”.

This kind of sentence-name is pretty typical for Biblical Hebrew. Gabriel means “G-d is my champion”, and Yəhoyakhin, one of the last kings of Yəhudah, has a name meaning “[haSheim] establishes” (presumably implying something like “the security of my reign”). What’s less typical is the arrangement of the sentence itself: Normally, you would expect G-d to be the subject of the sentence, not its object, and you certainly wouldn’t expect G-d to be an object of anything other than praise, gratitude, or beseechment. G-d as the opponent in a wrestling match is right out. Nevertheless, that’s how the Jewish tradition has long understood this name, right down to the present day — it’s so ubiquitous that the introduction to Judaism textbook my conversion class worked out of actually translates the first two words of the Shəma as “Listen up, G-d-wrestlers!”.

Modern Biblical scholarship has been less sanguine about it. Beyond the conceptual difficulty of making G-d the object of a grappling match, there are, apparently, philological difficulties in getting from the proposed root שׂרה | SRH to the יִשְׂרָ-‏ | \emph{Yisra-} at the start of the name. Published journal articles about it very quickly get very technical — expect references to sister languages ranging from Akkadian to Sabaic and plenty of passages of untranslated nineteenth-century academic German — and their conclusions are, to put it mildly, not always that compelling [b]. Of the proposed explanations I’ve encountered, my favorite is Leonid Kogan’s etymology of “G-d heals” or “G-d protects” [c], but I freely admit that this is a favorite derived along emotional and aesthetic lines, not scholarly ones; if you want to wade into the sources to figure out the etymology you think is most defensible on rigorous intellectual grounds, I wish you g-dspeed but cannot be your guide.

[b] Leonid Kogan, in “The Etymology of Israel” (Babel Und Bibel 3: Annual of Ancient Near Eastern, Old Testament and Semitic Studies, edited by L. Kogan, N. Koslova, S. Loesov, and S. Tishchenko, 3:237–56. Penn State University Press, 2006.), goes so far as to dismiss most etymologies proposed by scholarship of the past 150 years as “[ranging] from unconvincing to merely fantastic” (p 239). [c] Check the previous note for the citation.

Nevertheless, I think this dichotomy, this tension — between the inherited meaning of the name and the academic quest for its original meaning — is a beautiful capstone to this one-word Torah project and a fitting summary of the task we face as contemporary Jews. I don’t partake of the sport of wrestling, but from my outside perspective, it seems to require trying very hard to hold fast to things (usually human limbs) that are furiously striving to pull away from you in different directions, all while trying not to get held fast yourself.

We are in a moment of expansive access to Biblical commentary, whether in the form of digitized (and translated!) compendia by medieval Jewish philosophers or in the form of open-access publications by contemporary academic presses. I think this is mostly all to the good (tho I confess to worrying, at times, about the oral culture and lineages of transmission that get lost when I look up, say, the work of Rashi on my own in my bedroom instead of studying him under the aegis of a teacher in a chain of teachers), but it can very easily get overwhelming. In the face of that overwhelm, there is a real temptation to let certain sources go, to say, perhaps, “What use is this mystical mumbo-jumbo when the odd word they were trying to explain is perfectly accounted for now that we’ve re-discovered Ugaritic?”, or “Why would I pay any attention to what secular academics think proto-Jews 3,000 years ago may have been doing when I have the halakhic tradition to guide my understanding of these central Pésaḥ texts?”. From there, it is easy to get held fast, to find yourself over-committed to one kind of explanation, as much pinned by its grip as pinning it in yours. And I think that leads to a fragility and incuriosity that limits the possibilities of Judaism, that cuts us off from the potential of our texts.

It is undeniably true that different commentators pull us in different directions, frequently with great contradictions between them. And it is also true that we are, in my corner of the world at least, living in a cultural moment that abhors contradiction, that wants everything to be tidily categorizable, rigorously differentiable, either one thing or another. This historical figure was either a butch lesbian or a trans man avant la lettre. The voting patterns of hundreds of millions of people can be explained perfectly by this one factor. The scientific literature says exactly one thing, conclusively, about the efficacy of a new medical intervention. The text means this, just this, and not anything else.

I believe the task that we have as humans in the present moment is to become more comfortable navigating a world of ambiguity and contradiction. To learn how to hold at the same time explanations that pull in alternate directions, without being held ourselves. This is not to abandon the very possibility of truth — I believe in truth, I believe that truth is important and vital and absolutely necessary — but to abandon the notion that truth is always simple, direct, easy to acquire and understand. In a complex world, truth is often complex and the search for it difficult; the conclusions we reach will necessarily often be tentative, partial, incompletely satisfying. We must cultivate our ability to stay nimble, to learn broadly, to tangle with sources working at cross purposes. To wrestle, as it were, with the world, and to win, or at least bring it to a stalemate.

And when the world wrestles back, and cheats, and wrenches our hip, we have to trust that that is not the end, that healing is still possible, repair still possible, that there is still some force out there — the force of justice, the force of love, the force of countless friends and comrades and strangers working towards the good — fighting tooth and nail to protect the magnificence of life on this beautiful Earth.

⁂

Thank you for coming on this journey with me. Whether you followed each entry in this series as it appeared, dipped in occasionally, or are only just catching this one as your very first, I hope you found these posts worth the time it took to read them. I hope you found some meaning in them. I hope that, even when you disagreed with my conclusions, they showed you new or unexpected ways of grappling with these sacred texts. I tried not do do the same thing every week, in terms of either methodology, outlook, or conclusions. I hope you learned something, whether about the Hebrew language, about mystical numerology, or about the history of interpretative thought. More than anything else, I hope I made a strong case for my original premise: that the Torah is more than a collection of weekly themes, that there is mileage yet in paying close attention to the specific words written on this scroll, that attending to the concrete language here has its rewards. There are so many stones here left unturned. There is so much left to say.

For my part, I have learned a tremendous amount writing these 60,000+ words. There’s certainly been my forced march thru the Anchor Yale Bible series, an exercise I cannot say I really recommend for all that it illuminated both the depth and folly of certain streams of academic thought. But there’s also been a deepened awareness of traditional Jewish sources, both their content and their general patterns of thought. I still count myself a novice in this regard, but I at least think I can begin to see the dimmest contours of the outlines of my ignorance. More than that, I’ve learned a great deal about myself and what kind of relationship I have (and want to have) with the texts of my tradition. I don’t think I’ll ever be done growing and changing here — I want to stay open to newness until the day I die — but confronting the question of what I want to say about this text and who I imagine I’m saying it to week in and week out is nothing if not a rigorous exercise in evaluating those relationships. If you are drawn to large quixotic projects, perhaps you will find value there, too.

Originally, I was going to follow this year of drashes on the Torah portion with a year of drashes on the haftarah. These prophetic/historical texts are rich with interpretative potential, and my experience is that in many shuls they pass by almost entirely free of comment. I would like to dig into them, to make an argument for their continued vitality as part of the practice of our religion.

Unfortunately, I think that’s a project that’s going to have to wait. As much as I’ve enjoyed writing these divrei, there’s no denying that doing so has taken up rather a lot of my free time this past year, and free time is not exactly a resource I am drowning in. There are other things I would like to write. There is a prayerbook I would like to re-code. There is an opera I hope to complete. There is an entire world of interpersonal relationships that I want to nurture. There are books that aren’t academic Bible commentaries — a genre best measured not in pages but in feet of space taken up on a shelf — I want to immerse myself in. I would like to come back and tackle the haftarah cycle, but I would also like to live the rest of my life, and right now, the latter desire is stronger than the former, especially given how few hours I can call my own outside of gainful employment, eating, chores, and sleep. G-d willing, someday I will have the time. Maybe I will see you then.

⁂

The very last letter of the very last word of the very last book of Torah is ל, lamed, the equivalent of the Latin L. The very first letter of the very first word of the very first book is בּ, beit, the equivalent of the Latin B. There is a teaching — which I learned from Rabbi Marissa James, tho I believe she attributed it in turn to a different source which I have since, sadly, forgotten — that you can combine these letters to make the Hebrew word לֵב | leiv | “heart”. I’m not sure how you would do the equivalent in English (tho finding a V word to begin Bəreishit might let you gesture at “love”), but you can kind of get a hint at it if you render Bəreishit 1:1 as “Beginning: G-d made the heavens, the earth” and then dip into German to avail yourself of Leib and lieb.

The Torah splits our hearts, then. Or, perhaps better, to make the Torah whole, to bridge its end and its beginning into a ring of cyclic time, it takes our hearts. The Torah is incomplete without us, without its readers, its hearers, its interpreters, its carriers forward. And it wants us not as placeholders, automata, but as thinking, feeling beings. It is only when we come to Torah with our whole hearts, with the full richness of our lives and experiences that this strange impossible dance of drashing works. The Torah does not hang there, suspended in a vacuum, teaching immutable dictates to the stars — it is not in heaven, but right here, with us, in this place, in this moment. It is not enough to know what it has said to a prior generation, because their hearts are not our hearts; if it is to live, it must be thru us, shaped by the contours of everything that we know, everything that we care for, everything that we love.

We roll the scroll back to the start and begin again, and a year from now we’ll begin again, and then, later, begin again and begin again. What happens next depends on us.

[This is the final installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]

[apesoformythoughts]

‘Thus when one man says to me, “Moses meant what I think,” and another “Not at all, he meant what I think,” it seems to me the truly religious thing to say, “Why should he not have meant both, if both are true; and if in the same words some should see a third and a fourth and any other number of true meanings, why should we not believe that Moses saw them all, since by him the one God tempered Sacred Scripture to the minds of many who should see truths in it yet not all the same truths?”

Certainly—and I say this fearlessly and from my heart—if I had to write with such vast authority I should prefer so to write that my words should mean whatever truth anyone could find upon these matters, rather than express one true meaning so clearly as to exclude all others, though these contain no falsehood to offend me. This being so, I would not be so rash, O my God, as to believe that so great a man did not merit this gift at Your hands. When he was writing these words he wholly saw and realised whatever truth we have been able to find in them—and much beside that we have not been able to find, or have not yet been able to find, though it is there in them to be found.’

— St. Augustine’s Confessions (XII, xxxi)