Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah
portion is Parashat Bereshit, the first portion of the new cycle of scriptural
readings, the beginning of the whole thing, and by thing, I mean universe. The
first two chapters of Genesis tell slightly different stories of how the world
and everything in it came to be. Most notable is the discrepancy in the telling
of how humans are created.
In the first chapter, God says on
the 6th day, “Let us make mankind in our image. They shall rule the
fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the
creeping things that creep upon the earth,” and the Torah continues, “And God
created humankind in God’s image. In the image of God, God created it; male and
female God created them. God blessed them and said to them: Be fertile and
increase; fill the earth and master it.”
Chapter two starts off as though it
were a continuation or culmination of this version of events, but then verse
four starts a new telling in which man is created first and then the plants and
such are brought up in the garden around him, and woman appears to be an
afterthought all the way down in verse twenty-two. Whereas in chapter one, we
are told simply that God created, in much the same way that God said, “Let
there be light” and then there was light and humankind seems to be similarly
spoken into existance, in chapter two, we are told exactly how man and woman
are each created.
Because of the vagueness of the
wording in each telling, one student at Gesher a couple of years ago drashed
that there really was no discrepancy. Chapter one merely tells the macro-view
of creation, and chapter two includes the details of how and why and more of
God’s inner monologue. I found that a compelling explanation. Another possible
explanation from a different Gesher student that year was that the first two
humans were created agender and asexual, the way fetuses are formed with all
the same things at first and sex characteristics form closer to birth, and
develop only at puberty. Only as they began to develop personalities and
construct their gender and sexual identities did they truly become “man” and “woman”,
“Adam” and “Eve”. This midrash is not so different from one from the classical
rabbis, which posited that the first human was essentially a man and a woman
stuck together back-to-back, like an intersex version of the Roman god Janus,
and were later split into two people of separate genders. The official academic
and historical explanation is that chapter one was written in the early
Israelite days in Canaan when our ancestors were influenced by the goddess
cults of the land, and chapter two was written in the first exile when our ancestors
were influenced by the more patriarchal pantheons of Babylonia. They were likely
first combined in the Second Temple period and editors over many generations made
attempts to smooth out inconsistencies, but some details snuck through and made
it into the Masoretic texts which set the Biblical Canon we’ve known for over a
thousand years.
My favorite midrash on this, though,
is the creation of Lilith. There are many stories about Lilith, varying
thoughts about her historical origins, and visions of her as a demoness, a
sympathetic victim, a feminist icon, a mother, a baby-killer, a licentious
creature that mates with demons, centaurs, and satyrs, a tender lesbian lover, a
crone, a seductress. We will talk more about all of that on Sunday at the adult
break out group during our Fantastic Jewish Beasts event. We will read the Alphabet of Ben Sira, the earliest written Lilith story as a Bereshit midrash,
which explains that on the 6th day of creation, God created Adam and
Lilith together. Because they were created simultaneously, Lilith thought they
should be equals. Adam did not like that and they fought. Lilith summons
magical powers by saying aloud the ineffable name of God, and vanishes from
the Garden. God tries to compel her to go back but she will not and so God
condemns her to have hundreds of babies a day, and for 100 of her children to
die daily. God then sets about making a new, more subservient, mate for Adam. More
stories spin out from this one, and there is academic speculation about the oral
stories that inspired this written tale, but that’s pretty much all the detail
offered in this piece of writing that dates to somewhere around the end of the
first millennium CE. In a book I read this week, called Which Lilith, one
of the contributing writers points out that this story starts out sympathetic
to Lilith, understanding that maybe this is simply a broken relationship of
incompatible people without necessarily needing a villain, but then the
punishment for Lilith exerting her freewill is so dramatic that it seems we are
to understand her as villainous, thus connecting this first woman to a pre-existing
ancient Near Eastern demoness and inspiring further tales of her frightening
existence. There are so many layers to Lilith’s mythos and so many voices we know
are missing from the historical records, that it is very difficult to truly
comprehend what we are meant to glean from this midrash. Variations of this midrash
are so pervasive, that it is also hard to understand the differences between
Genesis one and two without inserting this other woman in there somehow.
All midrash is meant to be a window
into an ancient and fairly incomprehensible text. The Tanakh is filled with
stories that lack significant details, as well as bits of conflicting information.
We need midrash to help us make sense of these things. The classic midrash helps
significantly. We revere our ancient and medieval rabbis who set the tone for
modern Judaism, and we trust their wisdom almost as much as we sacralize the
Tanakh itself. Their stories can offer us satisfactory explanations or can open
new questions that allow us to get deeper into our own interpretations than we
maybe would by only looking at the surface of the Biblical texts. But they are
also products of their time as much as the ancient scriptures are products of
theirs. We see the influences of the time period and the ruling parties in the
rabbis’ various geographical locations at their time of writing. Digging
through the history of Lilith has been one excellent case study on that reality.
This is one of the many reasons that each Jew is encouraged to reinterpret the
texts for themselves and to come up with new midrash in every generation. The Tanakh
is a living document and the Talmud has given us an open canon. It is best done
with serious inquiry, and sincere inspection of the voices that have been
recorded before us, but it is available to all. The only rule of Midrash is
that it cannot contradict information from the Tanakh. It can build in missing
details, offer up dramatic tales to connect seemingly dissonant information in
the Tanakh, and it can most definitely contradict even the most popular
classical midrash. But it may not deny something specified in the original
texts. With that being the only rule, and with so much material to draw from,
the Tanakh is our playground. These characters are our action figures. We have
so much room to interpret and create and recreate whole worlds.
This Shabbat Bereshit, learn from
the Ultimate Creator, and build up something new from our ancient sources. And
may you be blessed with creations varied and rewarding. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.
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