Parshat Bereshit - Exile and Return is a seminal Jewish theme we normally associate with Exodus and the narrative of the Jewish People. We discover this theme in the first chapters of Genesis and in so doing discover the Hebrew Bible's universal message regarding the trauma of birth, the anxiety of life and the rewards of creativity and expansion.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/349788
Transcript:
Geoffrey Stern 00:00
Welcome to Madlik disruptive Torah. And every week, we record half an hour of what I call disruptive Torah, where we kind of look at the Torah with a new lens and maybe from a new angle and try to share that sense of discovery with our participants. So thank you all for joining. And we are going to start with Bereshit. And for those of you who have been listening and participating in clubhouse, I think you already know that one of my favorite commentators is Rashi. He wrote a commentary on all of the books of the Torah, including the Talmud, the Mishanh, I just an unbelievable encyclopedic review of the Holy Writ of the Jewish people. But it's not the expanse, it's the detail and he always brings a midrash or a quotation that is absolutely insightful and actually kind of positions the whole discussion. So the first verse of the Torah we all know "In the beginning God created the heaven in the earth." And the first Rashi starts as follows: "Rabbi Isaac said, the Torah, which is the law book of Israel, should have started with Exodus 12: 2 the first commandment "This month shall be unto you the first of the months", which is the first commandment given to Israel. "What is the reason" asks this Rabbi Isaac "then that it commences with the account of creation?" Pretty good question. We'll discuss the question in a second and its premise. And he answers "because of the thought expressed in Psalms, "God declared to his people the strength of his works, in order that he might give them the heritage of the nations.". Rashi continues, "for should the people of the world say to Israel, 'are robbers because you took by force the lands of the seven nations of Canaan', Israel may reply to them and say, from Psalms, all the earth belongs to the Holy One, bless be he. He created it, and gave it to whom he pleased, when he willed, he gave it to them. And when he willed he took it away from them and gave it to us." So Wow, what a way to begin studying the the narratives of the cosmology, the creation of the world, and our foreparents with a question of, well, what are we even reading this for? The Torah is a book of laws. It's a book that gives us the "hora'aot" the direction, the path that we should walk down. Why are we wasting our time with this mythology? And then he gives an answer, but let's stop for a second Rabbi and discuss the premise of his very question.
Adam Mintz 03:09
The premise is very problematic. The premise is that the only purpose of the book is to teach us laws. Ramban, Nachmanidies, the great Spanish scholar who lived in the 1200s. he disagrees with Rashi, here at the beginning of the Torah immediately. He says that the purpose of the book of Bereshit, of Genesis is not to teach us laws, but it's to teach us moral cause. He has a great phrase, the phrase is "Ma'aseh avot, siman l'banim" "the actions of our forefathers our models to the children", and therefore that's the reason we have all the stories in Bereshit. Rashi seems to argue with that. Rashi seems to say that, no, it's not about morality, it's about law. And if you think it's about law, there's no reason for the book of Bereshit. So Rashi needs to explain that it's to teach us about our connection to the land of Israel. So in that very first Rashi, there actually is a fundamental question about the purpose of Torah.
Geoffrey Stern 04:22
So I love the fact that you quoted "Ma'aseh avot, siman l'banim" which literally as you say means "the are stories of oure foreparents. "siman" is a sign for the children. And of course, you could expand and say "avot" could also mean as in "avot melacha" or "Pikei Avot", it could mean the most basic primary principles. So the stories of our roots, of our beginnings are is a siman is a sign for its children. But in a sense, "sign" is very similar to myth. Meaning to say that even Ramban quoting this Talmudic phrase, there's almost the recognition that we're not just telling stories here that either the stories actually occurred but they have deeper symbolic meaning. Or it's not that important that every one of them occurred because the symbolic meaning is what drives us. And if you think about that for a second, I'm not sure that is that different from what Rashi ends up answering, which is okay, the reason we need this is because these stories justify the Jewish people's coming from another place and coming into the land that was at the time that they came in occupied by another people. And the ethical, moral, or you could even say political message, the "siman" that we are getting from these stories is that you know what, no one owns anything. The earth belongs to the Lord. And he can give and he can take and that's a big message, I think for life. But but really they're all kind of on the same page from the fact that none of them, correct me if I'm wrong, is interested or believes that these stories by themselves as a historical record, belong in our holy book, they have to symbolize something, they have to inspire us in some way. Would you agree to that?
Adam Mintz 06:51
I would agree. Now, the idea of myths is a fascinating idea. I actually spoke about this right before Yizkor. There's the new book by Dara Horn. the book by Dara Horn is some title like people, "Why do people love dead Jews?" It's a provocative title. But she has a collection of essays. She raises the following idea, which is a great idea. You know, we're all brought up Geoffrey with the idea that the way that we all got our American names is our forefathers, our grandparents came to Ellis Island, and they only knew Yiddish. So they were asked by the by the representative at Ellis Island: "What's your name?" And they answered, "shoyn Forgesin", which means in Yiddish "I forgot". And the representative said, okay, your name is "Shawn Fergeson"And that's how everybody got their American names. They didn't know any English so they made up something and that became their American names. Dara Horn, the author points out that that is not true. We know that that's not true. What's true is that in the 1930s, we have multiple court records about Jews who actually went to courts in America, especially in New York, to change their names, because there was so much anti semitism in America, and they couldn't get jobs and they couldn't get into schools, and they couldn't get into colleges. And therefore they they asked to change their names. She said, Where does the myth come from? The myth comes from the fact that we as American Jews want to protect America, we want to protect the Jewish relationship with America. So therefore, that myth of Ellis Island is a much better myth than the truth. And I think Geoffrey, that's a very interesting idea here. When you talk about the myth of the stories in the book of Genesis. Did they happen? Did they not happen? The point is, it doesn't make any difference whether they happened or they didn't happen. But each one of them grapples with a moral issue. And not all of them are easily resolvable. Let's take Geoffrey the most difficult one of all, God says to Abraham, I want you to sacrifice your son. Now, the question is not whether that actually happens, or not, the question is why Abraham said, Okay, I'll sacrifice my son. What right did he have to sacrifice his son even at God's Word? So the entire book of Genesis is made up of these "Ma'aseh avot, siman l'banim" these stories, these myths that come to teach us a moral lesson. So I think Dara Horn is really on to something, that sometimes the myth is more important. Then the fact because it comes to teach us something important.
Geoffrey Stern 10:05
I think that's great. And clearly, these are myths that resonated, certainly when the Torah was edited, put together, and then re-read over and over again, these are myths that work picked for a reason. And then by simply being repeated so many times they take on a life of their own. And you get to see how different generations and different people react and interact with them. I have to say, as an aside here, that Elie Wiesel wrote a book on Rashi. And it struck Elie Wiesel that the first Rabbi that Rashi quotes is named Rabbi Yitzchok. And of course Rahi's name is Shlomo ben Yitzchak. So the truth is, this is a rabbi that comes from the Yalkut Shimoni it was not his father. But again, it does give another rendering to "Ma'aseh avot, siman l'banim" that we are looking almost like a Rorschach inkblot at the same stories that were looked at, by our forefathers, our forbearers in the case of Judaism, by Christians, by Muslims, by scholars. And that's kind of fascinating, too, I just find that the term that the stories of our past are a sign to us is so so pregnant with meaning, and makes it all so exciting. And getting back to your point about the sacrifice of Isaac, you know, another way to look at myths, and we're gonna start talking about how the psychoanalysts looked at it is like a dream as well. And, you know, the thing about a dream, especially a nightmare, is it's made to resolve certain things, talking about it, hearing it, repeating it over and over again. And then we can manufacture the ending sometimes. So the ending does become important. So I've always thought that the punch line of the sacrifice, or the binding of Isaac was that he wasn't sacrificed. But that is a story that we are going to discuss in the future. What I want to spend the rest of today's discussion talking about is something that I thought about for the first time this year. And that is that when Rashi brings up this point, that why do we need the stories? And he answers with a seemingly very provincial, national answer saying, well, it's in order that we should not be called colonizers, because we're going to come and we're going to, at a certain point in time, take this land that we admit, we are not originally from. And we need these stories to justify that land grab, so to speak. But what it really comes down to, and this is the insight that I want to spend the rest of the day talking about, is that the earth belongs to the Lord. And I would say, it's arbitrary that we own this, or we sit here or we live there. And then there's this other issue, which I really want to focus on, which is that none of us belong to a particular place in the sense we're all alienated from it. From the beginning of the Torah, we're going to see more than I think any of us ever expected. The theme of exile, over and over again in the first, just four chapters of Genesis. And Rashi is even here talking about this concept of exile and return that comes up much later in the narrative. But he brings it to the beginning of the Torah and that I think is not provincial is not partisan, but actually is one of the primary themes of the Bible. So in terms of the Bible itself, we all know that Adam in the second chapter, it has the story of man being created by himself. Maybe he was androgynous we don't know. But after looking for a helpmeet throughout the animal kingdom, God fashioned his rib in 2: 22 And it says, "and he had taken from the man into the woman, and he brought her to the man, then the man said, this one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, this one shall be called woman." So here you have this beautiful image of the unity of mankind of a man cleaving to his wife. And then it goes on to say, "for from men, she was taken. Hence, a man leaves his father and mother, and clings to his wife, so that they shall become one." So we have already in the second chapter, the first instance of this tension between being unitary, whole, complete, and being separated. And there's almost this sense of the separation is a necessary part of our identity. Ever think, and I'm not even talking about the amount of times in the process of creation itself. We had God is doing "havdalah" where he's creating by separating Earth from land, sky from the abode. Have you ever thought about it this way Rabbi Adam?
Adam Mintz 16:21
Yeah, well, the idea of separating.... you brought up a whole bunch of different things here. Let's talk about the last thing, the idea of separating the entire story of the six days of creation, is the story about separating, separating night from day, light from darkness, animals from people, the sun and the moon, everything has its opposite. What do you make of that? Why do you think that's so important, that in the story of creation, everything has its opposite?
Geoffrey Stern 17:03
Well, I think again, it gives us an insight into the biblical mind, the mind of the Bible's sense of God. And so many things about Genesis is about either dividing or choosing and when you choose, you also are selecting one thing and rejecting something else. It just seems so written in to the fabric. You can almost make the case that creation itself was not so much out of nothing, which is a Greek term, a modern term, but was this act of separating and repositioning. And it does become something that if you use it as a lens, enables you to understand much about the different narratives. In this particular case. I focused first upon man and wife, which is kind of, you know, the beginnings of society, separate from their father and mother, who is the father and mother of Adam and Eve. It's God in a sense, and of course, that story gets picked up a few verses later, in chapter three, when the famous Original Sin occurs. And at this point, God says to the woman, I will give you birth pangs, "b'etzev tilady", you shall give birth in pain, when you bear children, and your husband will rule over you, but also will struggle to pull crops from the ground, "by the sweat of your brow, shall you have bred to eat". Some of the modern day psychologists look at this whole story as the beginning of the "trauma of birth", that here, man was first created without those birth pangs. And he was first created without needing to separate the crop from the earth and to create creation, so to speak. And the first story of creation is this major separation where we are thrown out of the Garden of Eden. So again, everything that we've been talking about till now has focused on this separation. You can even call it alienation That we are torn apart. And that's how on the one hand, you could make an argument creation happens. But certainly it's the source of a lot of anxiety.
Adam Mintz 20:12
I mean, there's no question that that's right. A couple of things you brought up, number one, the idea of Adam and Eve not having parents. But then you have the story in chapter three of the sin. And God really takes the position of Adam and Eve's parents in the sense that he's the one who reprimands them, and he's the one who punishes them. I was always wondering, Geoffrey, the rabbis say an amazing thing. The rabbis say that Adam and Eve were created, they were put in the Garden of Eden, but they never actually slept a night in the Garden of Eden. They couldn't even make it one night, before nightfall they had already sinned. Why do you think it is that there was somehow a need for the Torah to tell us that they sinned so quickly, that part of the nature of human beings is to sin? What do you make of that?
Geoffrey Stern 21:16
Well, it's certainly the source or the intention of that type of explanation of the myth would come from the fact that it was it was just a taste, it was just so fleeting. And it happened in an instant. And I think that what I kind of come up with is, first of all, how final the divorce, how final the expulsion from the Garden of Eden was, you have these Cherubim, you have these angels with a sword, standing guard over it. It almost sounds as if it was part of the birth pang. It was a rupture, it had to occur, that everything that lies ahead, is after this fact. And that this story was there less to tell you about the bliss of the Garden of Eden, but more to focus you on the project that begins after the expulsion. That's my read. But it's true. We don't spend a whole lot of time on the pearly gates, the beauty of the Garden of Eden, it's almost as though On the flip side, the Torah doesn't spend much time, or any time at all, I would argue on describing a heaven. on describing a pearly end it's all about what lies ahead of us..
Adam Mintz 23:08
That point is such a good point. Because the Garden of Eden is much more important symbolically as the place where they will go back to, right? When we say when somebody dies, "b'gan eden t'he menuchatam" that their resting place will be in the garden of Eden. So the Garden of Eden becomes a place we're going back to not a place that we spend very much time in. That's a fascinating idea.
Geoffrey Stern 23:42
So that's a great segue for me to talk a little bit about the psychoanalytic analysts and Otto Rank, wrote two two books 10 years apart. One was called "The myth of the birth of the hero", and the other was called "The trauma of birth". And in the myth of the birth of the hero, he gives much credit to Freud and Freud actually, I wrote on this subject in a book he wrote called "Moses and Monotheism" and that is, and we'll discuss this when we get to Moses, is how almost to a "T" in every one of the ancient mythologies whether it's Romulus and Remus, or whoever. There's this story about the Royal heir, the prince who is expelled from the home, maybe it's because the father is afraid that he's going to come and usurp the throne, has to go out .... many times he's put into a raft through a boat, is raised by animals or simple people. And then you have like Odysseus, a whole way of coming back. Ultimately, if you get to the Oedipus story, he then comes back and he kills his father. He gets his mother and all is resolved. And that's what Rank writes about in this "myth of the birth of the hero". But he makes a major change when he talks about "the trauma of birth". And what he says there is that there's something even more primal, then this, Oedipus and this hero, and what that is, we are all born of women, so to speak, we all are ruptured and thrown into the world. And we are separated from that warm place of our origins. And unlike the Oedipus myth, he claims and I think he's right, and that's why I'm bringing it up now is that it doesn't necessarily or it does necessarily not get resolved. In other words, none of us can go back into the womb. And he brings the Cherubim outside of Eden, because he does see the creation of Eve from Adam, as a way to, to kind of detour around the birth of of humans as it actually occurs. And he does talk about taking the apple off the tree as giving birth to it and separating it. And what he talks about is the whole sin, the whole original sin that all of us human beings have to try to address and not necessarily resolve is this original disruption in our lives. And what argues is that you do not go back to Eden. And I do think you're absolutely right, that we talk about "Gan Eden Mi'Kedem". And we talk about in our prayers going back to Eden, but Eden does not feature as much in Judaism as in Christianity, the Fall does not feature as much. But certainly, there's this sense that the trauma of birth is something that we can't put back, you can't put the genie back inside of the bottle. And that's what kind of is intriguing to me. And again, when we look at myths, some myths, you can wrap with a bow, and they resolve themselves, and others are ones that are just the human condition that we have to deal with.
Adam Mintz 27:29
Yes, that is right. And you say that here in the in the very beginning of the Torah, we're really introduced to different kinds of myths. Now we talk about myths. Then you talk about the story of fratricide where Cain kills Abel. That's very much not a myth. That feels very real, doesn't it?
Geoffrey Stern 27:56
Well, it absolutely does. But thank you for bringing it up. Because that, I would say is the fourth instance, in our parsha this week, where we have this sense of being a wanderer on the earth, the punishment that Cain gets goes back to the same thing that happened with Adam. It says, If in Genesis 412, it says, "If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you." So this birth process will no longer be natural. And then it says you shall become a ceaseless wanderer on the earth. "Na v'nad ti'hiye b'aretz" Then he goes on to say that I "geyrashta" I will divorce you from the face of the earth. And it uses the phrase that we discovered in Deuteronomy at the end of the story, and it goes "umipanecha Ester" and I will hide my face from you. So again, these themes that we thought developed all the way at the end, were there all the way at the beginning as kernels. And then finally, where does Cain go to live and This to me is discovering humor in the Bible as well. "veYashav b'eretz Nod", and he settled he dwelt in the land of Nod. Nod is the same word for Na v'nad", that is he settled in the land of wandering.
Adam Mintz 28:05
Which means he never settled.
Geoffrey Stern 29:34
He absolutely never settled. He felt responsible for death, he had that guilt. And again, you can say yes, it's a real story. It's not a myth. But if you look at it in terms of all of the narratives that we've seen in Genesis, so far, through this lens, in the first four chapters, it's all about being sent into exile, alienated from one's source ripped away from whether it's the tree, whether it's the father, be it God or one's parents.... cleaving on to each other, to me, it just is so amazing that even though we're not talking about the story of the Jewish people that Rashi focused us on to, the idea is in humanity is this same trope of, of literally from the beginning, we are separated. And if you ask the same question that Rashi asks, from that perspective, then the answer is it needs to start here, because the journey is all about somehow regaining that unity that wholeness, that, that completion. So what what I also discovered is this amazing essay by Bialik, and it's called "Jewish Dualism". And he looks at all of Jewish history, he picks up on where Rashi left off. And he says that, you know, we've been out of the land more than we've been in it. Every time we've left, we've expanded, we've grown. He talks about "a group which adapts itself to the ways of life of the whole world, but nonetheless remains a people dwelling apart." And that's part of the other narrative. And he talks about this strength that it gives us. And I think he wrote it in the same year, as Otto Rank, wrote his book, and they both come to an interesting conclusion. And that is that it's not all a negative thing, that from each expansion and contraction from each exile and return. We enrich ourselves and we enrich others. And Bialik, who is considered the poet Laureate of Zionism, even ends his essay with the following statement, which is mind blowing, he says "And who knows, perhaps after hundreds of years, [of living in the State of Israel], we will be emboldened to make another Exodus, which will lead to the spreading of our spirit over the world, and assiduously striving towards glory." So he really sees it as a pathway going forward of enrichment that is intrinsic to the biblical project. And Rank talks about artists and philosophers and religionists who are able to take this trauma of being born against one's will being passed out and separated from one's natural mother parents from God from this sense of unity and he sees it also as a potential for amazing creation. And He therefore doesn't call the hero the hero anymore he calls it the artist which is kind of fascinating to me so I really do think that the the question is a good one Why do we read these stories? It's a question we all have to ask ourselves and how we answer it really says a lot about ourselves and the direction we want to go in but certainly having multi generations talk about the same texts like Rashi and his father Yitzchok and like you and I and like our listeners is part of the creative project which I think brings us together so anyway, I just love discovering these themes of exile and return so early in the mythological narrative, and I hope you do as well.
Adam Mintz 34:11
What a good star Geoffrey. We thank everybody enjoy the parsha Bereshit, and we look forward to continuing Noach next week. And we look forward to a great year of studying parshiyot together with you on Madlik. So thank you, everybody. Shabbat Shalom and enjoy the parsha.