On the way to New Orleans, but I've got some things to say about Genesis. Did I tell you about Biallas' interpretation? I'd forgotten it, all this time, or had forgotten to let it affect me. A lot of what I learned in my religion courses in college I've continued to apply to all religions BUT Christianity. Hmm – fair treatment, huh?
Biallas points out, much in line with my insights in Dec/Jan, that the "fruit of the Tree of Knowledge" and the Serpent's tempation are gifts – boons to humankind. When we analyze that story, of course it is obvious that if God is omnipotent and omniscient, then he put the Tree there, He created humans with a thirst for knowledge, and he had to know what would happen. Hard to argue with.
The problem is with interpretation and how we see the serpent. Christians – building largely but not wholly on Jewish tradition, have chosen to see the Serpent as an evil being, and the temptation as a test that we fail. So we need to be punished. This is an archetype – we keep acting out this story; it tells us our nature and our relationship with God.
What if instead you read the story as one in which God, knowing humans as he does, knows the best way to get them to do something is to forbid them it? So He sets up the whole situation to entice us into a world of intellectual stimulation, moral responsibility and choice, instead of just sitting on our butts enjoying the good life? The result isn't punishment – its growth. Yahweh isn't vengeful; he's an Intelligent Designer, pushing us toward our greater consciousness.
OK, so I read and thought all of that over break. Now I want to report some new stuff.
I'm reading The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn. Wonderful! Will fill in plot later. He discusses two rabbinic commentaries on the creation story (and others) in Genesis; That of Rashi and of a modern scholar, Friedman.
Two points. One, his own excellent question as a child – why does knowledge come on a tree? Why not a river? A flower? A stone? He ends up concluding it has to be a gowing, living, developing thing, like learning itself. Still, why a tree and not a flower? Tree has longevity and statliness I guess, is not frivolous. But there are an awful lot of flowers that one could hardly accuse of frivolity.
Two – All rabbinic commentators apparently accept that it was a fig tree, because Adam and Eve wrapped themselves with fig leaves! That flummoxes me. Where is the logic? Rabbis are supposed to have laid the groundwork for symbolic logic, logical reasoning in general in the West. And maybe Mendelsohn is overstating. But Rashi, widely considered one of the greatest, wisest, most important commentators, he says about the fig leaves: "By the very thing with which they were ruined, they were corrected." Since God made clothes for them. But maybe the Tree of Knowledge had tiny leaves, so they had to use a different tree . . . right? Geez! Else why would one be called "fig" and the other "Tree of Knowledge"?
Earlier, Mendelsohn points out something super important in the whole "origins" arguments. The Hebrew text of the beginning of the Torah is not "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth" What it says is:
Bereishit bara Elohim et-hashamayim v'et ha'aretz.
"In the beginning of God's creation of the heavens and the earth . . ." That little change in emphasis is just gigantic.
I've just finished Lost. Last night and many times while reading it I had to put the book aside and weep. Mendlesohn's story is interspersed with his musings on the Torah. More correctly, on the parashah, the weekly readings of Genesis. Thinking about what happens, even just from the Creation through the birth of Jacob, I do not see how one can conclude that Yahweh is a "good" God.
Clearly the stories are meant to tell his people, his followers, who He is and what He expects of them. Let them know what kind of God they've got themselves mixed up with. And it is the story of a very specific relationship; this one god watches and chooses this one man, and tests him, and decides he has the right qualities. The qualities this particular god is looking for. So he makes a covenant with him. Forevermore, Yahweh and Abraham will be bound together, along with all of Abraham's decendents.
The Torah is a record, and an explanation, and maybe like a manual. Like a book you would leave for your successor about how to get along with a cranky and persnickety boss. And for a very long time, neither the Jews nor anyone else claimed it was anything more. You have your gods; we have ours. You have your ways; we have ours. No claims to universal truths and righteousness. Just deep intimacy and relatedness, trust and interdependency. Why will we get the land of Canaan? Not because it is the "just," the "right" thing to happen, but because Yahweh is our champion and is more powerful.
If you read the Torah in this way and in this way only, can you remain untroubled. Because if you are looking for Yahweh to be just, kind, fair or good – forget it. Even to be consistent. The only way in which he is consistent is that he demands obedience and loyalty. He is always a jealous god. But he is absolutely horrified that Cain killed his brother Abel. One human murdering another is such a terrible abomination. Then just a little while later he's commanding Abraham to murder his own son. Of course he prevents that, but inbetween, Yahweh himself has annihilated all of humankind except Noah and his family (even babies, even children), and has killed every living being in Sodom and Gomorrah. Again, there had to have been innocent infants and children in those cities.
So if these stories are myths to teach us the nature of God, I think they teach that Yahweh is/was a partisan of the family of Abraham, who insisted on loyalty and defined goodness as obedience to himself – much as people generally did define things at the time. In other words, a God of the time and place. A god created for and by the people. A god that should never have been taken out of that context and made universal. Not without a serious makeover.
Then we come to the horrors of the Holocaust. No. I do not believe a living Yahweh, who had really Chosen these people, would stand by and allow that to happen. If he would, he's not good. A god who intervenes in history – Egypt, Canaan, Jericho, Jerusalem, etc. – choosing NOT to intervene in Germany? There is no possible sin big enough for a good god. These were children. All of them. Even the elderly. They were innocent as infants in comparison to what was done to them. No one with even half a tiny bit of goodness would allow it, who had the power to stop it.
So if there is no Yahweh, there is no Jesus. Not as Savior. Which I already believed. But its amazing how deeply rooted the habit of such belief is. And I guess its that no matter how much I want to just walk away from monotheism altogether and stop thinking about it, I can't. I live in a culture in which there is no escape. One is constantly and incessantly bombarded with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment