#torah portion

[girlactionfigure]

[ceaseless-exhauster]

I was scrolling way back on my own blog to look for an old specific post, and I could see the progression of my unending joy and fervor for Judaism morph into fear and anger and defensiveness as things have gotten worse and harder, and, crucially, as I have become a more solidified and educated member of the community. This makes me deeply sad, so I’m going to fight it actively.

All that to say: Torah study last night was delightful. It was a small group this week, just four of us, but not only did we laugh much and do a lot of Hebrew decoding exploration (which is my 🎶faaaaaavoriiiiite🎵), but we ended up talking at great length about the relationship between HaShem and Moses.

We did this in the context of HaShem getting super into wrath and retribution, as they are wont to do, and Moses’s reaction is to basically say “okay, but like, if you kill your own people, everyone else is gonna think you’re a loser who couldn’t defend this people you promised to protect.” And it WORKS!!

So we were talking about how interesting it is that not only is Moses of course the only prophet in the Torah to whom G-d appears in person, but how much more of an equal footing they appear to be on, more of a partnership than anything else. Look at Avraham when he bargained for Sodom and Gomorrah: “yes HaShem you are great and powerful but I also believe you are merciful please let me search for one righteous person there.” Yaakov literally wrestled an angel. Joseph received dreams and had very earthly concerns about them.

Meanwhile, we have Moses - this man who, despite being raised as a prince of Egypt, is by all accounts a pretty terrible social leader whose little brother has to do most of the logistical stuff. And yet, he perhaps has the deepest relationship with HaShem. He has the kind of relationship where G-d can appear right in the Tent for the sole purpose of looking Moses in the eye to proclaim “I am deeply hurt and angry!!” and Moses has the standing to say “I understand that, but you have a bad plan about it.” Isn’t that wild??

I’m glad this week was Sh’lach L’cha, there was so much in there to talk about and explore and it did so much to remind me of the simple fact that I LOVE Judaism!!! I’m gonna do my best to continue to embrace that more often even in the face of everything. I hope everyone is having a restful Shabbos 💙

[gay-jewish-bucky]

DID I READ THE PARSHA? - WEEK 27

Gregorian Date (DD.MM.YY): 25.04.26 Hebrew Date: 8 Lyar 5786 Book: Vayika (Leviticus) Parshat: Acharei Mot & Kedoshim Verses: Leviticus 16:1–18:30 & 19:1–20:27 Topic(s): Redemption of Aaron & Hebrews, Yom Kippur, Prohibitions & Restrictions & Requirements, Proper Treatment of Converts Status: Complete ✅

[eretzyisrael]

LEAVING ALREADY?

This week’s Torah portion, Yitro, is named for the Midianite priest who became Moses’ father-in-law. After hearing of the great miracles performed in Egypt by the God of Israel, Yitro questioned his own belief system and worship of multiple gods. Thirsty to learn more about the true God, Yitro traveled to the Israelites’ camp in the desert. He sat in his son-in-law’s tent for hours while Moses told him about the wonders and triumphs God performed for the Children of Israel. Moses converted Yitro into a member of the tribe, and this former high priest of idolatry became the Jewish prophet’s wise consigliere.Living in the wilderness with his adopted tribe, Yitro’s situation was heavenly. Protected by Clouds of Glory, learning Torah with Moses himself, eating delicious manna that appeared every day. So why did Yitro leave?? “Moses saw his father-in-law off, and [Yitro] went away to his land.” (Ex. 18:27) Now that Yitro knew God, why return to a place of idolatry? Rabbi Hanoch Leibowitz (1918-2008) explains that Yitro was so excited about the Holy One, the Torah, and the Jews, that he felt an obligation to share his newfound faith with the family and friends he’d left behind. He was willing to sacrifice the spiritual bliss of dwelling with his tribe in their holy encampment for the chance to bring others closer to God.May we all be like Yitro: humble enough to admit when we're wrong, brave enough to choose a different path, and kind enough to sacrifice everything to help others.Image: “Jethro Advising Moses” (detail) by Jan van Bronchorst, 1659

Accidental Talmudist 

[galaxy-manticore]

Genesis 4:8-12

And Cain spoke to Abel his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him.

And the Lord said to Cain, "Where is Abel your brother?" And he said, "I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?"

And He said, "What have you done? Hark! Your brother's blood cries out to Me from the earth.

And now, you are cursed even more than the ground, which opened its mouth to take your brother's blood from your hand.

When you till the soil, it will not continue to give its strength to you; you shall be a wanderer and an exile in the land.”

———

As a Palestinian Jew, the ongoing genocide makes my heart ache with a pain unimaginable.

October 7th was Simchat Torah, which starts the Torah over with Bereshit. The story of Adam and Eve, and of Cain and Abel. I personally found a parallel between the Cain and Abel story and the Palestinian Genocide.

Along the top and side are traditional Palestinian embroidery patterns. In both Arabic and Hebrew the middle says “From the River to the Sea.”

[its-holden-caulfield]

fuck zodiac signs what was your bar/bat/b'nai mitzah torah portion (parsha)???

[torais-life]

"Take care of your soul as you take care of your body"

-Rab. Yonatan Galed

[jessicalprice]

the two trees

(reposted from Twitter)

Been reading a lot about religious abuse and a lot of people writing about it talk a lot about Eden and the trees, and I'm feeling like it's time for a little thread about the trees. 

So. Everyone knows this story, right? 

Cool. Where was each tree located in the garden?

Here's the text. (Incidentally, "Eden" is the same word, essentially, as "edna", pleasure--when Sarah hears the promise that she will bear a son, she laughs to herself at the idea that she will have "pleasure", eden/edna, again.) 

And here it is in a different translation (Hebrew and English are so different that it’s hard for a single English translation to capture everything about the Hebrew--in this case, while I generally prefer Everett Fox’s translation, it doesn’t capture the link between adam (the human) and adamah (the earth/soil).

They both basically preserve the structure of the Hebrew as far as where the trees are: “the tree of life in the center of the garden... and the tree of knowledge of good and bad.”

So in the center, we have the tree of life.

And... somewhere, there's also the tree of knowledge. (Tov v'ra, "good and bad," is an idiom that means "everything"--the English equivalent would probably be closer to "Knowledge from A-Z”.)

Ok, so, we've got the tree of life called out as being at the center of the garden. And somewhere in the garden is the tree of knowledge. And then we get instructions.

So if you want to read this literally in English, these instructions are given to Adam, because Eve isn't around yet. But as I noted above, adam in Hebrew is also just "human." (adam from the adama, an earthling from the earth, a human from the humus.)

And there's a popular Jewish reading that says that the first human was actually male AND female, and Eve wasn't *created* from Adam--the first human was split into two. So maybe she was around. But if you want to be literal, the text only records this instruction to the man.

Anyhow, we have the tree of life in the center, and the tree of knowledge somewhere, and the man gets told don't eat from the tree of knowledge, and Eve doesn't exist yet (at least as a separate being).

So, Eve gets separated/created, and along comes the serpent, with a question that is already framed incorrectly (a tried and true lawyer technique--people will jump to correct you and accidentally admit things). “Did God really say: You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?”

So, we don't know what Eve has actually been told, or by whom. Did God give her the same instruction God gave Adam? Did Adam have to pass on the instruction to her? Did he do it correctly?

So let's look at her answer:

What’s interesting here is that while the translation inserts the “other” to make it make sense, it’s not there in Hebrew.

What’s even odder is that the first sentence is actually in the singular:

and said the woman to the serpent from the tree-of-the-garden we will eat

is the closest I can get to word-by-word, one-to-one translation. 

It should be in the plural construct form, atzei-, but instead it’s in the singular, etz-.

Then she goes on:

and/but from the fruit of the tree that is inside/in the center of/the essence of the garden, said God do not eat from it and do not touch it lest you die

So, first, let's get something out of the way: she adds to the instruction. The original instruction didn't contain anything about touching.

(And if you're going, eh, so what?, well, the Hebrew here is SUPER-terse. If something gets repeated, it's significant. And if it gets repeated with a change, that change basically has flashing lights over it.)

So either: 

God gave Eve different instructions (Adam wasn't told not to touch; she was). 

Adam relayed the instructions to Eve and added the part about not touching.

Eve added the part about not touching.

If the story wanted us to know that God gave Eve different instructions than God gave Adam, I'm pretty sure we would have gotten a scene with that. 

So either Adam or Eve engaged in the first instance of the rabbinic practice of "building a fence around the law”. The practice of building a fence around the law is, if the Torah says "don't cook a kid in its mother's milk," you don't eat milk and meat together just to be sure. It makes the law stricter. (BTW, for Christians: Jesus was super-into the rabbinic practice of building a fence around the Torah--if the law is "don't murder," he says don't even get angry with someone.)

And the instruction is changed in another way: 

God tells Adam don't eat from the tree of knowledge. 

Eve says we're not supposed to eat from the tree in the center of the garden (which has already been identified as the tree of life in 2:9).

So, the serpent says, you're not going to die, your eyes are going to be opened and you'll be like divine beings, knowing tov v'ra (literally good and bad, but colloquially, everything from A-Z).

And so she eats from... the tree. The tree in the center of the garden? The tree of knowledge? Nope. Just the tree.

Oh, and btw, the text is literally: she took from its fruit and ate and gave also to her husband THERE WITH HER (imah) and he ate. This entire time, the shmuck was standing right there not saying anything. All those stories about her running off to find him and seduce him? Heh.

Funny how the majority of translations just... don't translate that word.

So anyway, God asks them if they ate from the tree God had commanded them not to eat from (God initially identifies the tree of knowledge, Eve identifies the tree in the center of the garden--it's like the text is doing a shell game with the trees.).

There's a lot I could say about how bad the "pangs of childbirth" translation is (it's work, an explicit parallel to Adam's work of tilling the soil). Equal weariness for equal work, but that's a whole different discussion.

But then we get God speaking (unclear to whom, or who can hear), saying "we can't let them also eat from the tree of life" or... they'll live forever. But they were already eating from that tree, no? They had permission to eat from everything except the tree of knowledge.

So what's going on? Midrash goes WILD about the trees. It was two trees with a single root system, it was the same tree, one tree was the root system of the other, etc. I haven't encountered it, but there's probably stuff about the trees switching places somewhere.

Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, goes even WILDER, collapsing space and time. Adam and Eve were originally a single being, and so were Lilith and Samael, and those two in their combined form were the tree of knowledge, they got split when the fruit was plucked, which is why Lilith is so pissed.

But also, the serpent was Samael and the tree was Lilith, there's stuff I can't remember exactly with the tree and the flaming sword of the cherub guarding the way back to the garden being somehow related... Jewish mysticism doesn't always treat time as linear, so.

But I keep coming back to those two instances of:

Eden as paradise.

Sarah laughing to herself at the idea that she will have pleasure (edna) again in her old age. It's a root that doesn't occur all that often, so the link between those two instances rings out.

And you can read the text as God imposing punishment, like a vengeful parent. You can also read it with God as an overprotective parent, who wanted to keep the knowledge of what inevitably awaits adults--toil, exhaustion, and ultimately death--from the kids for a little longer.

But adulthood holds joys kids can't experience, too, like the joy of bringing life into the world. And birth is intimately connected with death. They are inextricably linked, the departure from the garden of Eden into the world of toil and death, and Sarah’s edna at the idea she will have a child. 

As bioethicist Laurie Zoloth observes in Born Again: Faith and Yearning in the Cloning Debate:

Birth, in its messy, uncontrollable tumult, is the closest moment we ever have to facing our own death, of course. The Jewish rabbinic tradition requires women to re-enact this by the ritual immersion and the public recitation of the prayer of rescue, both acknowledgments not only of the obvious risk involved in physical childbirth (a fact rather cheerily forgotten in all of the cloning debates) but also of the fact that the birth of a child re-states the ending of the self. It is the entrance into the room of your life of the he-who-will-hold-you-as-you-lie-dying...

At stake will be how it is to love like that, not the chosen one, not the close-as-can-be replica, but the surprising stranger who will live at your side... The act of parenting is the act of encounter with the other who is both not-you and of-you, your future and your responsibility, your obligation and your joy. In this way, we all learn to have the stranger, not the copy, live by our side as though out of our side.

God is not a human parent, but perhaps the departure from Eden is the moment when humanity becomes the beloved stranger, who is both not-God and of-God, future and responsibility, obligation and joy. 

I think here of one of our readings for Yom Kippur here:

You are our Beacon; 

we are Your burden. 

You are our Enigma; 

we are Your frustration. 

You are our Call to Conscience; 

we are Your critics. 

You are our Touchstone; 

we are Your loyal opposition.

Perhaps as a species, we’re still teenagers. 

What the link between birth and death, expulsion from paradise and the promise of a child, seems to tell us is that they’re the same tree.

Life beyond childhood and knowledge and death are all of a piece. Or, you can read it as both of those concepts--life/innocence and knowledge/death playing peekaboo with you throughout the text. 

But in any case, textually speaking, there is something VERY WEIRD going on with the relationship between those two trees.

And, most importantly, there is NOTHING simple about this story. It can't be read literally, and it's too mysterious to serve as a just-so story about men and women.

Photo credit: Johannes Plenio