Roni Tabick's Mythic Writing

500 Words a Day - Mr Bartleby

2021-06-17T17:51:00.002-04:00

The other students hated him, of course - but not me. I didn’t love him either, he was impossible to love, I think. Mr Bartleby was by turns boring, strict, impulsive, cruel and lazy. But almost worse than any one trait in particular was his unpredictability.
For example, a couple of weeks into our second year, he had turned up to class ten minutes late, leaving us standing in the corridor to get into trouble with passing teachers. Obviously we weren’t just going to stand there in silence while we waited. The first we knew of his arrival was the sound of his low, rumbling voice rising in pitch and volume as he roared across the hallway: “Second Years!”
At once, we all scrambled to our feet and stood to attention, with all conversation dying away mid-sentence.
“What do you call this disaster?!”
Mr Bartleby strode towards us in huge, leaping steps, his trench coat billowing behind him like the sail on the Mary Rose.
“Well?!” he bellowed, his puffy face turning a bright red everywhere except his mustard moustache.
“Sorry sir,” we mumbled, looking dejectedly at our feet and expecting a detention to land like a hammer blow.
A pause.
“Ha ha ha!” he laughed, “never mind, never mind, it’s all fun and games in the end. Carpe diem and all that. In you go, in you go.”
And in we went.
Little Dave thought this was his chance to make a joke but Mr Bartleby was having none of it and in an instant was starting him in the eye, lip twitching and a ruler appearing out of nowhere in his hands.
“Not… one… word…” Mr Bartleby whispered, “or it will be the last word you ever utter.”
And so it went. From minute to minute you never knew where you stood with Bartleby. If you made a face he might burst into laughter or throw a chalk at you; if you got all the answers right in a test he might give you a commendation or accuse you of cheating; if you were late for class he might make you stand outside the remainder of the lesson or give you a copy of his notes so you wouldn’t have missed anything.
You can see why the other kids hated him.
But there was something about him that spoke to me, even as a young man just finding my own sense of self. He seemed out of place, out of time. I never saw him chatting with a colleague, never heard anything of his life beyond the school (the idea that teachers had a life beyond school was still quite new to me). There was a sadness I thought I could detect in his eyes, behind the rage, behind the smiles.
Mr Bartleby treated me differently as well. I like to think he recognised a kindred spirit. “Never mind, lad,” he would say when I invariably messed up again, and again, “you’ll get it next time, right?” And I would promise to try my best.
Then the day arrived when Mr Bartleby never arrived for class.
After twenty minutes, the head of history arrived to cover for him, looking very flustered and put out. He didn’t know where Mr. Bartleby was. He didn’t know when he would be back. He never did come back.
Sometimes I like to think he sold his house and went to tour the world, having adventures in his trench coat, waving a machete in the jungles of the Amazon or riding a sled pulled by huskies as he tries to reach the North Pole. I wonder if I’ll see him again.
But then sometimes I recognise the same pain I saw in his eyes when I take a long look at myself in the mirror. I must be close to the age he was. Behind my smiles I know I feel the same bitter sadness as poor old Mr Bartleby, and I know that he’s never coming back.

500 Words a Day - Launching

2020-03-16T20:10:00.000-04:00

This one went a little dark, I'm afraid, but I guess that's where we are right now. Stay safe!

I wake up at 06:00 like I do every day, even without any sunlight. The stars beyond the porthole look just the same, always the same. Just the cycle of the light-strips in the ceiling tell me that ‘dawn’ is on its way. Still, I can’t complain. Life on the ship is alright, you know?

I wake up the same, stretch the same and get out of bed. I put on my slippers, my bath-robe, and switch on the coffee machine. While the machine begins its morning hum, I turn on my tablet and scan through my messages. Six notifications, but most of them are from the rest of the crew. One catches my eye - it’s a video message from back home.
This one should be savoured.
I wait for the coffee to brew, add the creamer, and take a seat on my sofa. I start feeling a buzz of excitement - videos from back home were a rare treat, as normally we couldn’t spare the bandwidth. There was a strict rationing of one message a week, and only a few GB at a time. We’d been out of port for six months and I was beginning to feel it - a kind of weight pulling down at me, a black hole beginning to grow.
I took a sip, and pressed play.

“Hi Daddy!” said the smiling face of Eli, my six year old, “we miss you and I can’t wait for you to come home.”
“Hi!” said Jo, my eight year old, looking too cool to be in the shot.
My partner, Toni, turned the camera on himself - “hey,” he said, “you look after yourself out there! We’ve got it all covered. And send us another message when you can, we loved the last one. Bye, love!”
The message stopped, pausing on his smiling, unshaven face. God, I missed them all.
But something didn’t feel right, I had the strangest feeling of deja vu.
I watched it again. Something about Jo… I went back through my old messages. I watched last week’s, the one from two weeks ago, three, four… When I rewatched the video from 7 weeks earlier my heart sank. Jo looked exactly the same - same facial expression, same turn of the head, same intonation. The clothes had changed but everything else was identical. It didn’t make sense.
I called the tech support team.
“Hey, Sue, sorry to bother you.”
“No problem, what’s up?”
“Just… Probably nothing but I had this weird sense of deja vu when I watched the latest message from back home. Are you getting anything on your end?”
“I’ll just check, hang on.” Her microphone muted and the screen went dark for a moment, before it flashed back to life. “All good here, but a flag came up - the sarge wants a word. Hold the line, please.”
I groaned, and tried to straighten my bath-robe to make a good impression, before the screen switched. I had expected to see the sergeant’s steely jaw but instead it was the captain herself. I stood to a salute.
“Captain!”
“At ease, soldier,” she said, and I tried to relax. “Heard you had a problem with your video.”
“Yes sir,” I muttered, wondering what the hell I had done wrong, “nothing major, sir, just a feeling of deja vu.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s my daughter, sir, she was acting the same as in a video from a few weeks back, sir.”
“Was she just acting the same?”
“No sir, it was like an exact copy.”
The captain seemed to think for a moment, before resolve settled over her face.
“You’re a fine worker, son, and I hate to be the one to tell you this. But… I’m afraid to tell you that home is gone.”
“What do you mean?” I forgot to add ‘sir’ and bit my lip. She didn’t seem to notice.
“I mean it’s gone. Two months after we headed into space there was a disaster, we don’t know the details, everyone’s gone. The last message we received was a warning - they told us to keep going, to not come back under any circumstances. I’m sorry, son.”
“But, but… the messages, my kids!”
“We had to fake them, remix them, couldn’t afford the truth getting out. Sorry about that, there was too much on the line, and the panic could ruin everything.”
I was dumbstruck, my life was falling down around me.
“Unfortunately, we can’t let you tell anyone else. You are relieved from duty, soldier, effective immediately. All communication between you and the others is suspended. The bots will deliver you meals until we arrive.” She moved to shut down the machine. “I’m sorry, son.”
“Wait!” I called, not knowing what I was going to say, “the messages…”
“Yes?” she said.
“Please, carry on sending them.”
“Alright, son. You’ll get one every week.”

I wake up at 06:00 just like I do every day, hoping to see a notification - a message from back home.

500 Words a Day - Whispers

2020-03-11T20:20:00.000-04:00

Mother Superior was ancient. Or at least that was the impression she had given off for the twenty three years she had been in charge of the convent. As far as anyone knew, she had always been ancient, born with wrinkled skin, greying hair and knowing eyes. Only now did the years seem to weigh heavy on her shoulders, pressing down on her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. It had been two days since she had taken to bed - even agreeing to accept the luxury of a feather pillow - and the convent had been awash with whispered rumours. Mother Superior was about to meet her maker.

For those two days, Sister Maria had not left her side. She had barely slept at all, and eaten only some mouthfuls of soup. No, her own physical form was unimportant, all that mattered was tending to her teacher, and making sure she was comfortable and at peace.

Mother Superior had been drifting in and out of consciousness for the last day or so, with her moments of lucidity getting ever shorter and more spaced out. Sister Maria sat and prayed from her small book of psalms and hymns, hoping that the words were easing the old woman’s spirit, if not her body.

“Maria…” Mother Superior croaked hoarsely, as she rose back from oblivion. “Maria…”

“Easy Mother Superior,” soothed Maria, reaching for a cup of water and helping her teacher to sip. “Do not push yourself on my account, you have a long and wonderful journey ahead of you.”

“Maria, there are things you must know… must tell you… before it’s too late.” She closed her eyes once more and seemed to sleep.

Sister Maria had been in the convent since she was a young girl and she knew no other life. If she had had a family other than the nuns, or a mother other than Mother Superior, she did not know them. She was lucky to have found a loving home, and always strove to be grateful. She turned back to her prayers.

“Maria.”

“Yes Mother Superior”

“Call me Agnes, dear one,” she said, “and hold a dying woman’s hand.”

“Yes Mother… Yes Agnes” Maria said obediently, and held the frail hand that felt like paper over bone.

“When I die,” her voice was quiet and uncertain, like nothing Maria had heard before from this formerly powerful woman. “When I die, you will be the new Mother Superior.”

“Me? But Mother S… But Agnes, I am so young! I have not the wisdom, not the experience, surely someone else, Sister Kerry, Sister Catherine…”

“All fine women, but no. It shall be you. I have made my wishes very clear.”

“But… why?”

Mother Superior’s voice dropped to a low whisper, so Maria had to lean in close to hear her words.

“Because you are a pure spirit, my daughter, pure and innocent. So open… and willing.”

“Thank you, Mother.”

“So good… so kind… you would give anything… for others…”

“Yes, Mother, you know I would.”

The old woman smiled. “Then I… shall take it” she whispered.

The frail body sagged in the bed, broken and lifeless, as a cold burning spread up Maria’s hand and through her arm. What was happening? It hurt so much, so much, she had to scream, she had to…

Agnes opened her new eyes and looked down at the lump of useless, worn out flesh beneath her. It had definitely been time for an upgrade. With any luck, this body could easily be stretched out for a few decades, maybe even more. And there was bound to be another young woman before then.

After all, the convent had a way of attracting the pure, the noble, and the generous.

500 Words a Day - the Fantasy Pub

2020-03-08T21:17:00.000-04:00

This one kind of ran away from me. Not sure how much sense it makes but here you are.

“You should have seen tonight’s catch, my man, it was a real shiner!” Timmy the tooth fairy gestured with his pint glass enthusiastically. “A real shiner!”

“Oh yeah?” nodded his colleague Kate absentmindedly, without much enthusiasm.

“Yeah, I tell you,” continued Timmy, warming to his theme, “don’t get them like that very often any more. Y’know,” he said taking a big swig of beer, “back in the old days kids used to respect us, right? Used to treat us nicely, right? A bit of kindness for the old tooth fairy, maybe a little note under the pillow thanking us kindly and so on and such like. Am I right?”

“Course you’re right Timmy,” mumbled Kate, putting her head on the table and staring at the rising bubbles inside her drink as her wings began to droop behind her.

“But now! None of that, and I mean none of it. Bloody hell, we’re lucky if they even put the tooth under the pillow at all! It’s almost like they don’t care what happens to their teeth any more. I don’t know, man, I don’t know.”

Kate’s eyes began to close. She had had some long nights searching kids’ bedrooms for their missing milk teeth but without much success, and lugging the coins around had given her wing-strain. She just needed a bit of a rest, and then she could get right back to it.

Dimly, Kate could sense some of the other patrons of the bar, and their gentle hum of conversation was downright soothing. There were some cupids in the back, waiting for Valentine’s Day and everyone to get off Grindr. A couple of bunnies downing shots of chocolate milk. At the back, Kate thought she could hear someone faintly singing “Ding dong merrily on high”, which meant the Elves were already wasted.

“Here, hold up a minute,” Timmy muttered under his breath, nudging Kate back to wakefulness. “Look who’s gone and bloody walked in through the door.”

“Who is it Timmy?” Kate said blinking.

“If it isn’t bloody Elijah himself,” Timmy said, putting his glass down on the table and standing up.

Elijah was striding through the door and aiming for a seat at the bar, but Timmy got up to intervene.

“What do you think you’re doing here, Elijah? Not had enough wine at Passover Seder? Need to get bloody pissed in our bloody pub?”

“I’m not looking for trouble Mr Tooth Fairy,” Elijah said, putting his hands up and framing his long wiry beard. “Just looking for a drink in a nice quiet pub”.

“Oh you are? Mister Elijah is looking for a drink in the bloody pub for fictional characters! The trouble is, mate, you ain’t no fictional character!”

“Yes I am,” Elijah protested, “no real person could visit every seder table and drink a spot of wine without being seen by the children.”

“That’s just a myth, mate, and you know it,” Timmy said, advancing on the hapless prophet.

“What about Saturday nights? I always travel the world on Saturday nights, giving everyone a little blessing as the sabbath goes out.”

“Oh yeah? Think that makes you fictional, do you? This here pub is a nice place for nice people, nice Christian people.”

“But what about the bunnies - what’s Christian about eating chocolate eggs?”

“They’re for bloody easter,” Timmy snarled, “now get out before I make myself a collection from your mouth!”

Elijah hurried out the bar in a whirlwind.

“Bloody prophets,” sighed Timmy, getting back to his drink, “never know when they’re not wanted.”

But Kate was already asleep, dreaming of human children and their bad dental hygiene.

500 Words a Day - Ocean Dreams

2020-03-03T18:14:00.000-05:00

Of course, the sea was barely salty.

It had a hint of salt, as otherwise no one would have recognised it as the ocean at all, but by and large the Ocean of Dreams tasted like liquorice or caramel, and the overriding impression on tasting it was sweetness.

Yet nevertheless, the dreamer hesitated on the shores. Her toes barely touched the sea foam as the waves ploughed their course up and down the golden sand. Not really sand - the dreamers toes were curled around the dust of ancient dreams, from long forgotten sleepers, who had fallen into the real and never returned. Each mote of sand called in a different voice, but she could barely hear them, so intent was she in scanning the horizon.

With a soft surge, another wave drifted up the beach, this time caressing her feet with lovers’ kisses before whispering away. The tide was coming in and her watch was nearly over for another day.

She couldn’t say for sure why she had started watching, nor what precisely she was watching for, but in between wakings this was where she always wanted to be - on the shore of the Ocean, with the living breeze in her hair, the sand brushing her skin. It reminded her of - something. Something she still could not grasp.

And so for eighteen years she had stood, and breathed the sea air, and watched, and waited. Occasionally she would see other dreamers - lovers, fighters, travellers. Knights and shamans, singers and fools, all had passed by in their time, but they never lingered. The sea which drew her so irresistibly seemed to repel all others, as if its voice was crying for her alone.

“Jasmine,” it whispered, as it rushed towards her.

“Jasmine…” it sighed as it retreated once more.

The familiar weariness was returning, her eyelids getting heavy. The world was calling her back. She prepared to surrender to the darkness.

When something changed, a mast of a ship penetrated the horizon, a crimson sail, purple pennants streaming. A huge boat was skimming the waves, heading directly for the shore with alarming speed.

The dreamer could not move - she found herself completely entranced by the oncoming vessel, as it approached, neared, and then drew itself up onto the sand.

“Jasmine, my darling, my love,” called a soft, familiar voice, bubbling up from inside the ship. “I am here at last!”

It took her a second to find her voice. “Who - who are you?”

A man dressed in swathes of blue and green leapt over the railings and landed in a cloud of sand. His eyes twinkled beneath a mass of hair.

“Jasmine! It is I, the Ocean itself. I have become human so I can love you just as you love me. Come, let me hold you close.”

“No, no, no” whispered the dreamer, covering her eyes.

“What is it, my love? Do you not love me? Is this not what your heart has desired for these eighteen long years?”

She uncovered her eyes, and faced him sombrely, afraid of somehow breaking him.

“I do love you,” she said, “but just the dream of you.”

And with that, Jasmine woke.

500 words a day - Message for the Future

2020-03-02T20:17:00.002-05:00

“We just want you to know that we did our best.

“I know it’s not much really, not in the great scheme of things, but that’s all we can say. We did our best, we tried our hardest - we’re sorry that it wasn’t good enough for you, for any of you. You deserved better than we could deliver, and we’re sorry.

“Sounds pathetic, I know. I want you to forgive us, if you can, we didn’t know, or if we knew, we never really understood. There was so much going on all the time, such a constant hum of words and news, our phones demanding attention, our glowing screens calling to us, that we didn’t notice before it was too late. Some of us did, but how were we supposed to know? How could we have understood what was fact and what was fake?

“We did our best, that’s what I’m trying to say.

“I don’t know how I know that that’s true, to be honest. Could we have tried harder? Let’s put it more precisely - could I have tried harder?

“Of course. Of course I could. There were so many days when I let it all wash over me, while I watched the latest super-hero movie, or youtube clips of cute goats falling over, or eating takeout. Why wasn’t I frantic? Why wasn’t I running around screaming that the house was burning down? I don’t know really. It seemed like a marathon and not a sprint, even when the finish line was hurtling towards us.

“We did our best, I say, because I need you to forgive me. And not just me, I need you to forgive everything my generation took from you, stole from you. I want to be able to look you in the eye, and see that you understand why we did what we did, why we stayed silent when the world was falling apart. I need it. It’s the only way that I can find peace - imagining the look in your eyes, nodding and understanding. Forgiving us. Forgiving me.

“I don’t think we deserve it. I don’t think I’ll live to see it, either, but across the years I hope that these words will reach you. Somehow, drifting on the tides of eternity, my little message in a bottle may wash up on your distant shore as you scavenge to survive. You’ll wonder what words of wisdom your ancestors left for you, what seemed so important that it had to be recorded forever.

“I’m sorry. This is it.

“No wisdom - turned out we were sorely lacking any wisdom that really mattered. No message of hope or love - there is precious little of either, and in the end each person must find their own. Just an apology and a request.

“We’re sorry for what we did, and what we failed to do.

“But now we need you to admit, that if you were in our shoes, if you were faced with the same choices, you’d do exactly what we did. The flaw was not in us, it was in our species, in our nature. Right?

“You have to admit… that you forgive us. Right?

“Because then it can’t be our fault.”

500 Words a Day - Happily Ever After

2020-02-26T19:03:00.000-05:00

I recently took up the challenge of writing 500 words every day, using writing prompts as a way to get the creative juices flowing. While most of what I've written so far has been too personal to post, I thought I'd post today's effort. Please be kind!

PROMPT: Happily Ever After
And they all lived happily ever after.
That was the idea, anyway, thought King Thasareus, downing his third glass of whisky for the night and waited for one of his servants to whisk it away to the kitchen. This wasn’t the way it had been supposed to go.
Back in the day, he had been simple Thass, youngest son of a poor farmer, with dreams of knights and swords. While his six older siblings had learnt how to work the farm, he had been out in the words swinging sticks at imaginary monsters, pretending to climb towers and rescue princesses. Dreaming of having servants to wait on him, and all the food and drink he could wish for.
Then the dragon really came, and it didn’t seem so fun anymore.
Thass had been sixteen years old when the dragon burnt down the village, carried off the princess, and demanded tribute. The old king had promised that whoever slew the beast would be the heir to the throne, and… well, you know the rest.
But it turns out that getting what you want is not the same as wanting what you get.
Princess Katara had been grateful, for sure, and he couldn’t deny there had been a certain animal magnetism between them at first, but that had quickly turned into disdain, which morphed over a few years into disgust. She had grown up in a royal palace with the best tutors that money could afford. She spoke seven different languages, and could compose love poetry in them all. After ten years of living in the palace, Thasareus was still struggling with his letters. The chasm was just too large to be bridged.
Two years after the rescue, the old king passed away. He’d never been the same after the dragon’s attack - it was nerves, really, and he slowly wasted away. Somewhat reluctantly, the other nobles had crowned Thass king in his place, renamed his King Thasareus I. They saw his incompetency, his ill-suited nature, but they couldn’t go against the clear commands of the beloved king, not when all the common folk were cheering on ‘their man’. Besides, the noblemen of the court new better, Thasareus had realised after a couple of months, they knew that they had time on their side.
The memory of the small-folk was short, and their gratitude fleeting. All the other nobles had to do was bide their time and soon enough the mood would turn against the new-crowned king, once it was clear that he was in way over his head.
Now, Thasareus was king in name only, a figure head for the Royal Council to make the decisions, and sign them in his name. He had stopped going to their meetings a year ago.
Soon, they would tire of being the puppet masters and seek the public glory that came with the crown - only their fear of each other was holding them back. One day, Thasareus would wake up to see a paid assassin looming over him with a knife in his hand, wondering which of his ‘advisors’ was behind it. Perhaps it would be Queen Katara herself.
“More drink!” Thasareus called down the hall.
No one answered. The servants had vanished. One by one the hallway torches went out.
Maybe this was it, Thass wondered absently. He put his head on the cold, marble table, and closed his eyes.

Biblical Creation and Mythology in Ha'aretz

2015-10-09T06:35:00.000-04:00

An excellent summary of the influence of other Ancient Near Eastern mythology on the Bible - just in time for Shabbat Bereishit.

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/.premium-1.678408

Myth and Law - Senior Sermon - Mishpatim

2015-02-14T13:21:00.001-05:00

This past Thursday it was my honour and privilege to deliver my senior sermon to the JTS community, my colleagues and teachers that have meant so much to me over the last 5 years of learning. You can watch it on YouTube here, or read the text below (but you'll miss some of the ad libbed jokes).

Touch the wooden gate in the wall you never / saw before.
Say "please" before you open the latch, / go through,
walk down the path.
A red metal imp hangs from the green-painted / front door, / as a knocker,
do not touch it; it will bite your fingers.
Walk through the house. Take nothing. Eat / nothing.
However,
if any creature tells you that it hungers, / feed it.
If it tells you that it is dirty, / clean it.
If it cries to you that it hurts,
if you can, / ease its pain.

    Thus begins the poem ‘Instructions’ by Neil Gaiman, explaining the rules one should follow if you ever find yourself in a fairy tale, the web of laws that one should obey in order to emerge triumphant from the realm of folk and fable.
    In genres that are defined by breaking the rules, by imagining the impossible, we might be surprised to find so many laws that drive the plots of fantasy and science-fiction stories. In the classic movie Gremlins, we learnt that ‘No matter how much it cries and begs, you mustn’t feed a Gremlin after midnight’, or the cries of Chief Engineer Scotty in Star Trek that ‘I can’t change the laws of physics, captain.’
    Mythology too is full of rules.
    Celtic Mythology, for example, laid out a system of Geasa, taboos that should never be broken, on its heroes and kings. These rules often seemed arbitrary, like never eating dog meat, never wearing a rainbow cloak at sun rise, never sleeping away from home for 9 nights - but violation of these Geasa usually resulted in tragedy.
    And just as the tales myth often hinge around rules, so too rules are often founded on myths.
    After nearly 5 years of living in this country, perhaps I can mention the legendary status of the Founding Fathers, the mythic quality of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, as opposed to the more legal agenda of the American Constitution.
    Law and myth are intertwined, each giving birth to the other.
    And so it is in Parashat Mishpatim.

    The parasha begins with laws, following on from 10 commandments:
    Laws of slaves, laws of torts and damages, exhortations to treat other people fairly and do justice:

    “15] And he that strikes his father, or his mother, shall be surely put to death.”
    “5] If anyone grazes their livestock in a field or vineyard and lets them stray and they graze in someone else’s field, the offender must make restitution from the best of their own field or vineyard.”
    “25] ‘If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest.”

    But it ends in the realm of mythology - Moses, Aaron, Aaron’s sons Nadav and Avihu, and the 70 elders ascend the mountain and see a vision.

10. and they perceived the God of Israel, and beneath His feet was like the forming of a sapphire brick and like the appearance of the heavens for clarity.

    How can these two elements of Mishpatim exist side by side? How can we connect the mythic and the legal?
    Law is about social norms, order, logic - it’s concerned with real world, maintaining boundaries.
    Myth is about the mavericks, the heroes, the leaders. Concerned with a world of extremes, in which boundaries are routinely crossed (setting foot on the forbidden mountain, seeing the forbidden face of God).
    This question is at the heart of my Judaism and my rabbinate, how to unite my two great loves, the logical and the fantastical, the Talmud and the Zohar - the side of me that loves outlandish and often transgressive stories about demons and sea monsters, and believes that these tales get to the deepest element of what it means to be human, and the side of me that believes in the power of halacha to transform our regular human lives through precisely defined actions, and loves the intricate logical debates of the legal system.

    This hybrid nature of Torah is expressed by Rashi in his first comment on the Torah. He quotes the Midrash and says:

אמר רבי יצחק לא היה צריך להתחיל [את] התורה אלא (שמות יב ב) מהחודש הזה לכם, שהיא מצוה ראשונה שנצטוו [בה] ישראל

   He asks, why did the Torah begin with creation, with the flood, with the stories of Abraham and the patriarchs? Surely the Torah should have just started with the first real law, the law of Pesach and the month of Nisan.
    His answer, justification of Jewish claims to the land of Israel, is less interesting to me than the assumption behind his question. Seems like he is saying none of this myth stuff matters - surely Torah is really only about the laws, and all this poetic nonsense about light, darkness, divine beings and monsters could be skipped to get to the good stuff, the stuff we need to live - halacha.
    This is a position we have heard, that we may feel ourselves - the Talmud classes that skip rapidly over the aggadic portions of the text to get to the really important meat of the arguments. Sometimes myth seems irrelevant, hard to decipher, and frankly bizarre.
    But I feel the power of myth, the visceral excitement of the stories that sets my heart racing and my imagination aflame...
    Surely we need both!

    In fact, the Talmud itself intermingles halacha and aggadah, flowing from one into the other as the subject moves them. One particular story in Baba Kama 60b highlights the importance of keeping both elements of the tradition together:

    Rav Ammi and Rav Assi were sitting before Rav Yitzchak the Smith, one of them said to him: ‘Let the Master tell us some law’ while the other said: ‘Let the Master tell us some aggadah’. He started speaking aggadah and one of them prevented him, he started speaking about law and the other prevented him. So he said: I will tell you a parable: To what is this like? To a man who has two wives, one young and one old. The young one plucks out his white hair, and the old one plucks out his black hair, until in the end he was completely bald.

    Trying to remove one, picking out the aggadah from the sea of halacha or vice versa, ultimately results in no tradition at all - and like Rav Yitzchak, we have to find a way to combine the two, bring out the mythic from the legal and find the ritual that flows from our legends.

    Here I think the parable of the white and black hairs is helpful - while this implies that one of the two is older, it doesn’t tell us which. Is Aggadah more ancient? Is it that stories spawn laws out of them, arising from a need to enact the principles encoded in the myth in reality? Or is halachah more ancient? Does law exist first, and myth comes to try to justify and explain it?
    The Talmud does not say - and in fact both seem to me to be true. Both myth and law evolved with our people through the millennia, and each grows out of the other, like the chicken and the egg.

    Chaim Bialik pondered this question in his essay halacha v’aggadah. Unlike Rashi, who felt the justify the presence of aggadah, Bialik’s target was defending halacha from modern Jewish artists who thought that aggadah was living and vibrant, while halacha was stagnant, fossilised and irrelevant.
    Bialik explains this relationship:

    “Halacha is the crystallisation, the ultimate and inevitable quintessence of Aggadah; Aggadah is the content of halacha. Aggadah is the plaintive voice of the heart’s yearning as it wings its way to its haven; Halacha is the resting-place, where for a moment the yearning is satisfied and stilled.”

    For me, mythology, as a subset of aggadah, typifies this process. Myth is the timeless expression of the human soul, whose cry bursts into the reality of the universe and crystallises as ritual, as halacha, a way of trying to bind the infinite and eternal to the time-bound and the ephemeral.

    Some of us here may find ourselves identifying with Rashi, feeling that all these crazy stories are kind of silly, and hard to understand. We long for some logical halachic debate, with clearly defined terms and parameters.
    Some of us may identify with those addressed by Bialik, feeling that it is the myths and legends that get our blood pumping but feel bored and constrained by the notion of obligation, and the details of a life bound to halacha.
    As I set out in my rabbinate, I want to create communities that feel inspired by both halves of our tradition, who keep ritual laws and feel the heart-pumping legends beating below the surface, and who know our great legends and use them as a source of inspiration to take real action in the world.

    For our myths in the end mean nothing, if we do not respond to the voices of pain and need that we hear all around us:
    if any creature tells you that it hungers, / feed it.
    If it tells you that it is dirty, / clean it.
    If it cries to you that it hurts,
    if you can, / ease its pain.

5 ways Samson is Hercules - Naso - Mythic Torah

2014-05-29T21:41:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to Mythic Torah, my regular article investigating monsters, heroes and gods in the weekly Torah reading. This week's reading is Naso, the 2nd reading from the book of Numbers, that explains the jobs of the different priestly families in carrying the Tabernacle, before explaining the laws of the Nazirite, the priestly blessing and the Sotah ritual for a woman suspected of adultery.

My favourite Bible character as a child was Samson, the Nazirite judge from the book of Judges, whose birth story in Judges 13 is taken for the Haftarah for this week's torah portion of Naso.

I loved Samson, primarily because of his resemblance to He-Man (of Masters of the Universe fame).

After all, like He-Man, Samson had super strength, fought bad guys, and even had long hair (I have yet to hear a better explanation for He-Man's haircut than this).

But looking back, Samson is actually a deeply strange character, who sticks out like a sore thumb in the Biblical narrative.

He has super strength, that seems to come from having long hair. While the Bible repeatedly tells us that Samson also served as a Judge for the people of Israel, we never see him serving the people in any of the narratives that are told. Instead of helping people, Samson is motivated by desire, seeing beautiful women and feeling that he 'has' to have them. He spends all his time with Philistines and yet is considered to be a leader of Israel. He is selfish, stupid and violent, massacring Philistines in increasingly bizarre ways.

How can we make sense of this?

Well, in another ancient tradition, Samson wouldn't stand out at all. For example, if Samson were a Greek hero, many of these traits would be expected, and one Greek hero in particular has some remarkable similarities with our hirsute judge.

Let's compare Samson and Hercules (and yes I know that his Greek name is really Heracles).

1] Born of a God and a Mortal
Let's get the most controversial out of the way first. You might think that the most obvious difference between them is that while Hercules is the illegitimate child of Zeus, Samson is born of human parents, as described in this week's haftarah.

But if you look closely at Judges 13, there are little hints that all is not as it seems.

We are told that Manoach, of the tribe of Dan, has a wife, sadly unnamed, who is barren, a common enough Biblical trope, but then in verse 3 we find:

The angel of the Lord appeared to her and said, “You are barren and childless, but you are going to become pregnant and give birth to a son..."

The oddity here is not in the content of the prophecy but to whom it was given. Unlike in the case of Abraham for example, the angel of the Lord appears to Manoach's wife in person, when she is alone in the field and her husband is nowhere to be seen, and tells her that she will become pregnant.

When Manoach asks God for the man to come again, he does so in verse 9, again when his wife is alone:

God heeded Manoah's plea, and the angel of Lord came to the woman again. She was sitting in the field and her husband Manoah was not with her.

It's extremely unusual for married women to be out in the field without their husbands, and even more unusual for them to receive this kind of prophecy.

In fact, the case is even stronger than that, as when the Bible says the Angel of the Lord, it often actually means God Himself, having taken some kind of mortal form to walk on earth. We can see this in Genesis 18, when the Lord appeared to Abraham and then three 'angels' come to meet him, or at the end of our haftarah when Manoach worries that they will surely die because "they have seen God" (v22).

So God Himself 'came' to a married woman alone in the field, twice, and then she miraculously got pregnant and had a super-powered son...

2] Lions

You can always recognise Hercules when you see him in classic art because he always bears two items - the second is number 3 below, but the first is a lion skin, that Hercules is always depicted wearing over his head. This is the skin of the Nemean Lion, a giant monster that Hercules slew as the first of his labours, and wore afterwards as the skin was virtually impenetrable.

Samson too is closely connected with a lion, in an encounter that happens on his way to get his first Philistine wife:

"5] Samson went down to Timnah together with his father and mother. As they approached the vineyards of Timnah, suddenly a young lion came roaring toward him. 6] The Spirit of the LORD came powerfully upon him so that he tore the lion apart with his bare hands as he might have torn a young goat. But he told neither his father nor his mother what he had done."

The lion makes a return appearance in the form of a rather awkward riddles, but its appearance here is as a deadly foe to attack Samson just as he is setting out on his heroic journey, just as the Nemean Lion is the first of Hercules' labours.

3] Blunt Instruments
To defeat the Nemean Lion, Hercules must turn to a club, as his hide was impenetrable to blades. This became the second sign of Hercules, and he is always shown carrying his club into battle, while other Greek warriors used swords or spears.

Samson too is connected to blunt objects (as well as being something of a blunt object himself). In Judges 15:15 he takes up the jawbone of an ass and kills 1000 Philistines with it. In fact, Samson never uses a bladed weapon.

4] Women Troubles
Samson's eventual capture by the Philistines is caused by his second wife, Delilah (whose name sounds rather like Lailah, meaning night, an interesting contrast to Samson, whose name connects to the Hebrew word Shemesh, meaning the sun).

In Judges 16 Delilah eventually persuades Samson to tell her the the secret of his strength, that it lies in his uncut hair. She promptly shaves him completely, and Samson is easily captured by the Philistines who torture and imprison him.

Hercules too is brought low by his wife, though in his case it was mostly inadvertent. In a somewhat convoluted story, Hercules' second wife Deianira, has a coat laced with a hydra's poison that she believes will make Hercules love her more. When she eventually suspects him of adultery, she gives him the coat to wear, only to find that it burns her husband's flesh off his body and kills him (though Zeus brings his immortal part to the heavens, elevating him to godhood).

5] Doorways
Perhaps most interestingly, Hercules and Samson are both connected to doorways.

Hercules is famed for passing through two passages in his labours, first out of the Mediterranean, creating the 'Pillars of Hercules', that we know as the Straits of Gibraltar. And then in his 12th and final labour, Hercules crosses the threshold of Hades to capture the three-headed dog Cerberus, who guarded the realm of the dead.

These gateways, at opposite ends of the world, west and east, connect also to the rising sun, that ancients believed passed through tunnels beneath the earth every night.

Samson too is connected to doorways.

In Judges 16 there is a very strange story when Samson is surprised at night in Gaza, in the west of the land of Israel, and escapes by lifting the doors off their hinges and carrying them all the way to Hebron in the East.

And then Samson ends his own life standing between two pillars, as he is taunted by the Philistines and brings down the whole stadium, killing everyone inside.

* * *

So what do these connections have to teach us? Why are there so many connections between the Greek Hercules and the Biblical Samson?

The Archeologist Dr David Ilan of Hebrew University, who spent 20 years excavating Dan in the north of Israel where Samson is meant to be from, told me his own theory at Limmud UK a couple of years ago.

If you look at the material archeology in Dan, it is extremely Greek in origin, much more so than the rest of Israel. It seems to Dr Ilan, that the tribe of Dan were originally a 'Greek' tribe (the Greeks called themselves Danaan, remember), that moved to the area in ancient times and became absorbed into the people of Israel over time.

The story of Samson then is a Dan story, one that they may have brought with them as their own cultural hero, that the editor of Judges drew on in his compilation, including the Danite hero in the national saga of the Bible. This story too is holy, is the message, the tribe of Dan are part of our people, and this story deserves its place in our canon.

More than that, Hercules and Samson are archetypal sun heroes, connected with the rising and setting sun, as their powers too wax and wane. They both have a lot in common with Gilgamesh, who has to run through the tunnels of the sun before it set, in order to learn the secret of eternal life.

But while Hercules attains actual immortality, elevated forever to the pantheon of Greek gods, Samson earns a very different kind of immortality.

Samson's immortality lies in his legend, in his actions to fight the enemies of Israel.

But ultimately, I think the Bible (and certainly the rabbis) are unsure if we should be emulating Samson. His life is full of conflict and he never receives any peace or reward in his lifetime. While Hercules was widely adored and worshiped across the world, Samson is a bit of an embarrassment in the Biblical text, a giant of a man that we can learn from, but who we should not strive to copy.

Divine Punishments - Bechukotai - Mythic Torah

2014-05-16T12:07:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to Mythic Torah, my regular article investigating monsters, heroes and gods in the weekly Torah reading. This week's reading is Bechukotai, the 10th and final reading of the book of Leviticus, that focuses on the rewards and punishments associated with following or disobeying God's commandments.

I've been a bit sick this week so I'm afraid that Mythic Torah is shorter than usual. Hope to be back to normal by next week, when we begin Bamidbar, the book of Numbers.

Prometheus Bound

When the Greek gods decide to punish someone, they go about it with a certain zeal and creativity.

Think of Sisyphus, forever condemned to pushing the same rock up the same hill, as every time it reaches the top it falls all the way to the bottom.

Or Tantalus, eternally suffering with unquenchable thirst and insatiable hunger, with both food and drink just out of reach.

Or the Titan Prometheus, bound to a rock where an eagle eats his liver every day, only for it to grow back every night.

The Norse Gods too could be extremely creative in their punishments.

Like Loki, punished for his many crimes by being bound beneath the earth while a venomous serpent drips poison in his eyes, with his wife catching most of the poison in a bowl until the bowl is full and she has to turn aside to empty it out, leaving Loki to writhe in pain.

God, by contrast, seems to lack a certain amount of imagination.

In our parasha of Bechukotai, God promises great rewards to the people if they follow the laws, and great retribution if they don't. The punishments go on for far more verses than the rewards do, and include disease, defeat in battle, famine, wild beasts, desolation and death (Leviticus 26:14-46).

But there are other important differences too.

All three of the Greek characters we mentioned actually perform actions that might benefit mankind. Sisyphus tricks Thanatos, death itself, into chaining himself up, thus preventing all humans from dying until he himself is brought low.

Loki

Tantalus' crime is stealing the food of the gods, ambrosia and nectar, from Zeus' table and bringing it down to earth. While Prometheus stole fire from the gods, and gave it to human beings, thus beginning human culture and civilisation.

The sin of these characters is that they break down the boundary between gods and mortals, and they did so in favour of the human beings.

Loki too is not punished for any sin committed against human beings, but for creating chaos among the gods, and instigating the death of Odin's son Baldr.

The God of the Bible operates on a different moral plane than the Greek or Norse gods, and His concerns are for humanity and their place in the world. While we have seen the danger in coming too close to the divine realm, ultimately God's real punishments are reserved for failing to keep the ethical and ritual code as laid out in Leviticus.

Mountains and the Sublime - Behar - Mythic Torah

2014-05-09T10:57:00.003-04:00

Welcome back to Mythic Torah, my regular article investigating monsters, heroes and gods in the weekly Torah reading. This week's reading is Behar, the 9th reading of the book of Leviticus, that includes instructions for buying and selling land, as well as the rules for the Shemitah and Jubilee years.

I've always liked high places.

As a child, spending a lot of time at West London Synagogue, where my mother was the rabbi for many years, I would search out windows with broad ledges to sit on, so I could look down at the world from several storeys up. It was a man-made structure, but I loved feeling like I could see everything, and especially that I could see others without being seen myself.

I love the mountains of Switzerland - both standing at the top and feeling like I can touch the heavens, and standing at the bottom, feeling dwarfed by the mighty peaks all around me. When surrounded by such awesome heights it puts your life and your own problems into perspective, as you realise just how small and short your life is. A mountain feels to me like a place to touch eternity.

This week's torah reading of Behar opens with setting the scene for the instructions that follow:

1] The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying:

א. וַיְדַבֵּר יְהֹוָה אֶל משֶׁה בְּהַר סִינַי לֵאמֹר:

While we think of the Mount Sinai experience being based in Parashat Yitro (that includes the 10 commandments) and Ki Tissa (that includes the Golden Calf), but in fact not only does the whole section of the tabernacle at the end of the Book of Exodus take place at Sinai, so too does the entire book of Leviticus. It's only after Leviticus that the Israelites are finally ready to move away from Sinai and begin their journey to the Promised Land.

But what is the significance of the mountain itself? What is so special about mountains?

The Bible is not short on sacred mountains.

Apart from Mount Sinai, we have Mount Zion in Jerusalem, site of the Temple, the house of God; then there is Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal upon which the Israelites have to recite blessings and curses before entering the land; Mount Ararat is the final resting place of the Ark in the Noah story; Mount Carmel is the site of the confrontation between Elijah and the prophets of Baal.

Then there are the High Places, the Bamot, that so dominate the books of Kings as each successive ruler either builds, takes down or does not take down these sites that are forbidden by Deuteronomic religion but apparently quite widespread throughout Israel (and more on these later). While these High Places were probably once viewed as legitimate places to worship and sacrifice to God, for the author of Kings they are an abomination, drawing the people away from the only legitimate sacrificial site in Jerusalem.

Other Mythologies

Probably the most famous sacred mountain has to be Mount Olympus, fabled home of the Greek pantheon, and a real place in Greece. From its lofty peak the twelve Olympian gods were said to watch over the mortal world, having established their palace there after the defeat of the Titans.

Closer to the Bible is Mount Tzaphon to the north of Israel, that in Canaanite mythology was said to be the site of Baal's palace, built after he defeated Yam. Isaiah even mentions Mount Tzafon in one of his prophecies, as he describes a fallen star swearing to ascend to heaven and "sit enthroned on the mount of assembly on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon" (Isaiah 14:13). Even in Israel, Mount Tzaphon was known as a place of divine power.

Why Mountains?
The religious experience that mountains inspire seems to relate to the aesthetic idea of the sublime, an experience of something vast and awe-inspiring, such that in the face of it you feel almost insignificant. Like staring out at the vast ocean (itself the imagined home of many monsters) gazing up at the mountain peaks high above your heads makes you feel small and under the gaze of something far larger and more ancient than yourself.

By contrast, standing on top of a mountain can make you feel closer to the divine realm. Not only are the clouds nearer, but the perspective you gain can make the rest of the world look tiny. I can see why ancient Israel built their altars on mountain tops, as it must have felt like a place that was closer to heaven.

The Power of Nature
Living in New York City, the closest thing that I usually come to the religious experience of mountains is going to the top of a skyscraper.

And while I love city living, I do think I undervalue the experience of being in the natural world, drawing inspiration from trees, lakes and mountains.

Man-made objects are impressive, but they don't draw your mind to heaven in the way that the natural world can do, as I find myself thinking more about the power and ingenuity of humanity than the sublime beauty of the world.

Standing at the mountain of Sinai, the Israelites experienced a huge range of religious moments. Not just the revelation of the ten commandments, but a wealth of other laws and practices, and even the construction of the Tabernacle, as God's movable home.

What revelations will you gain when you stand at the foot of the mountain?

Disability and the Celts - Emor - Mythic Torah

2014-05-02T10:05:00.000-04:00

Nuada Silver-Hand

Welcome back to Mythic Torah, my regular article investigating monsters, heroes and gods in the weekly Torah reading. This week's reading is Emor, the 8th reading of the book of Leviticus, that includes further instructions for the Priests as well as the major festivals of the Jewish year.

As a religious Jew, and particularly as a future rabbi, I come to the Torah looking for wisdom and guidance. I expect the Torah to speak to me with a voice of holiness and divinity, a voice that calls me to be better than I am.

But there are sections of the Bible, and the Torah in particular, where this set of assumptions is hard to maintain, where it is very difficult for me to see the perfect voice of holiness that I look for.

Emor contains one of those sections.

After beginning with instructions about the Priests avoiding dead bodies, God gives Moses instructions about priests with physical disabilities:

16 The Lord said to Moses, 17 ‘Say to Aaron: “For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. 18 No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; 19 no man with a crippled foot or hand, 20 or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. 21 No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the food offerings to the Lord. He has a defect; he must not come near to offer the food of his God. 22 He may eat the most holy food of his God, as well as the holy food; 23 yet because of his defect, he must not go near the curtain or approach the altar, and so desecrate my sanctuary. I am the Lord, who makes them holy.”’
-Leviticus 21

טז וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָֹה אֶל-משֶׁה לֵּאמֹר:
יז דַּבֵּר אֶל-אַהֲרֹן לֵאמֹר אִישׁ מִזַּרְעֲךָ לְדֹרֹתָם אֲשֶׁר יִהְיֶה בוֹ מוּם לֹא יִקְרַב לְהַקְרִיב לֶחֶם אֱלֹהָיו:
יח כִּי כָל-אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר-בּוֹ מוּם לֹא יִקְרָב אִישׁ עִוֵּר אוֹ פִסֵּחַ אוֹ חָרֻם אוֹ שָׂרוּעַ:
יט אוֹ אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר-יִהְיֶה בוֹ שֶׁבֶר רָגֶל אוֹ שֶׁבֶר יָד:
כ אוֹ-גִבֵּן אוֹ-דַק אוֹ תְּבַלֻּל בְּעֵינוֹ אוֹ גָרָב אוֹ יַלֶּפֶת אוֹ מְרוֹחַ אָשֶׁךְ:
כא כָּל-אִישׁ אֲשֶׁר-בּוֹ מוּם מִזֶּרַע אַהֲרֹן הַכֹּהֵן לֹא יִגַּשׁ לְהַקְרִיב אֶת-אִשֵּׁי יְהוָֹה מוּם בּוֹ אֵת לֶחֶם אֱלֹהָיו לֹא יִגַּשׁ לְהַקְרִיב:
כב לֶחֶם אֱלֹהָיו מִקָּדְשֵׁי הַקֳּדָשִׁים וּמִן-הַקֳּדָשִׁים יֹאכֵל:
כג אַךְ אֶל-הַפָּרֹכֶת לֹא יָבֹא וְאֶל-הַמִּזְבֵּחַ לֹא יִגַּשׁ כִּי-מוּם בּוֹ וְלֹא יְחַלֵּל אֶת-מִקְדָּשַׁי כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָֹה מְקַדְּשָׁם:

It's important to understand what is not being said here. The priests who are disfigured, injured or disabled are not disqualified from being priests. They keep their priestly titles, and all the priviliges that come with that status, such as eating from the holy food in the temple.

Yet anyone who is not physically perfect is forbidden from performing the temple rituals.

Why? Surely God, who is beyond all physical form, does not care about our bodies. If the priest is able to conduct the service despite his disability, why should he be prevented from doing so? Isn't it what's on the inside that counts?

Celtic Mythology
Interestingly, there is a similar idea in a very different mythology, that of the Celts of Ireland. In the first battle of Magh Tuireadh, the gods of the celts, called the Tuatha De Danann, fought against the Fomorii for control of Ireland. While the battle was won, it was not without cost as Nuada, king of the Tuatha De, lost his hand in the battle:

In that battle, moreover, Nuada's hand was stricken off - it was Sreng son of Sengann that struck it off him, so Dian Cecht the healer put on him a hand of silver with the motion of every hand; and Credne the brazier helped the healer...
A contention as to the sovereignty of the men of Ireland arose between the Tuatha De Danann and their women; because Nuada, after his hand has been stricken off, was disqualified to be king...

The High King of Ireland that lost a limb in battle had to abdicate the throne, despite his victory and the strength of the silver hand that replaced his original. Like in Emor, the Celts believed that only a physically unblemished person was suitable to represent the nation.

But unlike in Leviticus, in the story of the Irish gods this rule is a source of great tension, as Nuada is replaced by Bres of the Fomorii people as a bid for peace between the nations, and the result is terrible. Bres ruled for seven years and enslaved the Tuatha De Danann, forcing them to chop wood and dig ditches. Eventually, he is defeated by a newly whole Nuada, who has his silver hand replaced by a new one made of flesh and bone.

The physically impaired Nuada is replaced by the morally impaired Bres, and yet the story requires Nuada to be physically whole once more before he can return to rule as High King. There seems to be a critique here of the desire for physical perfection, yet it isn't as fully realised as we might hope.

The Temple as a Miniature World
At some level I can understand the mythic idea, that the representative of the people should be a perfect specimen of humanity but it seems so limiting to me that the Bible understood perfection to lie in physical wholeness, rather than spiritual or ethical perfection (though the rabbis at least understood ethical perfection to be implied by these verses as well).

Leviticus views the Tabernacle and the Temple as microcosms of the universe, and just as the creation of the universe is wholly good, as God pronounces its goodness over and over again, so too the Temple should be a space of goodness. If the shabbat at the end of creation is the time in which we look at the world as if it were already perfect, the temple was the physical space that represented the same idea.

Yet to understand this mythically is to ignore the human beings behind the physical bodies, just as I am criticising our tradition for doing. Human dignity should not be sacrificed for the sake of mythic symbolism.

The only way I can understand the prohibition on those with physical disabilities from serving is as a concession to the people at the time.

When the Temple still stood, perhaps the people were unable to see past the physical limitations to the person behind them, to the perfect soul that God created in the divine image. Perhaps they were unable to see such a person as reflective of that wholly good state of the universe that the Temple was meant to conjure, just as the Tuatha De Danann couldn't imagine a maimed man serving as High King in sacred marriage to the earth goddess.

Physicality Today
I'd really like to think that we have changed, that humanity has improved since then, that we can now see the person, not the body.

But honestly I don't know if that's true.

I think we are, in many ways, still in the same place that Emor thinks we are, still limited by the physical bodies we are seeing. The main difference I think, is that we can now be aware of this problem in our society, and being aware of it, we can strive to change ourselves and the world.

Emor may not speak to me with the voice of holiness that I expect from the Torah, but it nevertheless challenges and places demands upon me. Are we still in this place of viewing others through their physical limitations?

And if we are still in this space, then which of us is truly impaired?

Wicked Witchcraft - Kedoshim - Mythic Torah

2014-04-25T10:25:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to Mythic Torah, my regular article investigating monsters, heroes and gods in the weekly Torah reading. This week's reading is Kedoshim, the 7th reading of the book of Leviticus, that demands that the Israelites be holy, for God too is holy.

Those fingers in my hair
That sly come-hither stare
That strips my conscience bare
It's witchcraft
And I've got no defense for it
The heat is too intense for it
What good would common sense for it do?
'cause it's witchcraft, wicked witchcraft
And although I know it's strictly taboo
When you arouse the need in me
My heart says "Yes, indeed" in me
"Proceed with what you're leadin' me to"
It's such an ancient pitch
But one I wouldn't switch
'cause there's no nicer witch than you
-Frank Sinatra, Witchcraft

Sinatra's 1957 hit 'Witchcraft' encapsulates both the attraction and the revulsion that human culture has felt towards witches over the millennia - the magic strops away his conscience, removing any free will to resist the witch's seduction, yet at the same time his heart says "yes indeed", and he states that there is no "nicer witch".

This week's parasha of Kedoshim calls on the people of Israel to be holy, for God is holy, and contains ethical imperatives and sexual prohibitions. But spread throughout the parasha are 3 verses about magic: Lev 19:31, Lev 20:6, and 20:27 all contain prohibitions against what we might call witchcraft, or more accurately spiritualism or consulting with the spirits of the dead:

לא. אַל תִּפְנוּ אֶל הָאֹבֹת וְאֶל הַיִּדְּעֹנִים אַל תְּבַקְשׁוּ לְטָמְאָה בָהֶם אֲנִי יְהוָֹה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם:

31] Do not turn to the Ovot or the Yidonim, do not seek to be defiled by them. I am the Lord your God.

ו. וְהַנֶּפֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר תִּפְנֶה אֶל הָאֹבֹת וְאֶל הַיִּדְּעֹנִים לִזְנֹת אַחֲרֵיהֶם וְנָתַתִּי אֶת פָּנַי בַּנֶּפֶשׁ הַהִוא וְהִכְרַתִּי אֹתוֹ מִקֶּרֶב עַמּוֹ:

6] The person who turns to the Ovot and the Yidonim to prostitute themselves by following them, I will turn my face from them and I will cut them off from their people.

כז. וְאִישׁ אוֹ אִשָּׁה כִּי יִהְיֶה בָהֶם אוֹב אוֹ יִדְּעֹנִי מוֹת יוּמָתוּ בָּאֶבֶן יִרְגְּמוּ אֹתָם דְּמֵיהֶם בָּם:

27] A man or woman who has an Ov or Yidoni in them you must put to death. You are to stone them; their blood will be on their own heads.

What is an Ov or a Yidoni? Classical interpretation understood them to be witches, people who claimed to have supernatural powers (whether justified or not) but then Lev 20:27 doesn't make much sense. How can a person have a witch in them?

The so-called Witch of Endor, in 1 Samuel 28, makes this clearer, as she is called in Hebrew a ba'alat Ov, a master of an Ov (I talked about this in more detail here). Her power is not in casting spells or enchantments, but rather in contacting the dead, as she does when she calls up the prophet Samuel. The Ovot and Yidonim then seem to be the spirits of the dead, familiars that Mediums would turn to to seek out knowledge and wisdom from beyond the grave.

Why do we have these three verses in a parasha about holiness? What is the problem of giving in to the attraction of witchcraft?

In the ancient world there was a strong cult of the dead, a religion of ancestor worship, where people would give offerings and devotions to their dead relatives and pray to them for inspiration and good fortune.

The Bible has no patience for such a practice.

The Torah wants you to know that God alone should be the object of your worship, that you shouldn't turn to the spirits of the dead but instead to God. These Ovot and Yidonim then are rivals to God for the affections of Israel. They are attractive figures that we might be seduced by, prostituting ourselves in the process, but they must be resisted at all costs - and the penalties for giving in to temptation are severe: defilement, being cut off, and death by stoning.

These spirits of Ovot and Yidonim promise great knowledge and power - the word Yidoni may even imply 'the knowing ones' - but it is a knowledge that comes from breaking boundaries, from crossing over the divide between the dead and the living, a barrier that should not be torn down.

We are forbidden from consulting with Ovot and Yidonim, not because it doesn't work, the Medium of Endor makes it clear that the Bible thinks it does work, but because it is defiling and against the sanctity and holiness that God demands of us.

Our parasha is called Kedoshim, holy, and God makes the huge demand upon us to be kadosh, to be holy, a word that in Hebrew has connotations of being separate and special, set aside for a particular purpose and role. It is the same word we use for marriage, kiddushin, setting aside another person as being in a unique relationship with us.

The torah demands that the Jewish people be holy, like God is holy, that we are to exist in a relationship of mutual holiness with the divine, striving to emulate God through moral, ethical and ritual behaviours. But this relationship comes with the same promise of monogamy as marriage, a demand that we will not turn to other powers for assistance.

Wanting More
Human beings have always sought to know more, to understand more, to find sources of wisdom and power wherever they can. We have turned to astrology, soothsaying, ouija boards, tarot card readers, druids, bone readers, necromancers and witches in order to learn the secrets of the cosmos and thereby prosper in our work and relationships.

Kedoshim tells us that these practices are unacceptable.

Now I personally don't believe that any of these things work. I don't believe that there are witches that have familiar spirits and can contact the dead, and any one who claims such a power, I believe is probably a charlatan. In the rational world I believe we live in, there isn't a place for communing with the dead to gain wisdom from beyond the veil.

So what does this prohibition mean to me?

It seems to me that holiness is about living, about life experience, about the dirty business of being a good person in the real world. While the demand to be kadosh is to be in a unique relationship with the divine, as Jews we are told to live out that relationship as part of the living, breathing world, balancing competing goods and evils in the ongoing battle to be ethical people.

Turning to the dead is putting the emphasis on the wrong place, thinking that answers can be found outside of the world, apart from that relationship with living human beings. Turning to the Ovot and the Yidonim takes a person out of this world, and puts all the focus on the next, investing the dead with power that they simply don't have.

We certainly should venerate the dead, but not more than we honour the living.

The attraction of witchcraft is real and palpable. It strips our conscience and our common sense away, leaving nothing but the beating heart of desire - I want, I need. But Kedoshim tells us to resist the pull of spirits, the lure of forbidden knowledge, and focus on living as a part of this world.

Cinderella and Passover - the Magic of Midnight

2014-04-17T07:36:00.002-04:00

    There is a story told across cultures, especially in Europe, of a woman oppressed by her stepmother and stepsisters, who, aided by magical or supernatural help, meets a fabulous prince at a ball. Whether her name is Aschenputtel, Cendrillon or our more common Cinderella, there is a common trope that she has to leave the ball by midnight or else all the magic becomes undone.

    At midnight the coach will turn back into a pumpkin, the horses back into mice, the gorgeous gown back into rags, and the marvelous glass slippers will disappear.

    There is this tendency in western literature to see midnight as the witching hour, the time that is most dangerous, when evil stalks abroad.

    It is no coincidence that Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven begins “Once upon a midnight dreary” or that the Headless Horseman from Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ is described as “like a Midnight blast”. The dead of night is all that is unnerving, disquieting, unsettling, as the dawn seems endlessly far away.

    But the Pesach story is, in some ways, the opposite of Cinderella. Cinderella on the night of the ball was free and happy but at the stroke of twelve all the magic came undone - but in the Torah's description of the Exodus, in Exodus 12:29, we see that our freedom began at precisely midnight:

    29 And it came to pass at midnight, that the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the first-born of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the first-born of cattle.

    At that moment the Israelites were no longer slaves - the midnight hour indeed brought danger and death (even the Israelites had to protect themselves with blood on the doorposts) but it also brought redemption.

What is the significance of midnight?

    First night of Seder we sing a special poem by the medieval poet Yannai known as ‘VaY’hi b’chatzi halailah’, 'And it happened at midnight', that describes all the moments of redemption throughout Israelite legend and history that were supposed to have taken place at midnight, starting from Abraham’s victory in the war of the four kings and the five kings, through Jacob wrestling an angel, the destruction of Sennacherib, and King Ahasuerus from the Book of Esther waking up in the middle of the night to hear the book of chronicles.

    Night time is scary - our imagination fills the darkness with terrors - but Jewish tradition asserts that in the middle of the darkness, the darkest point of the night, is not a time of dread but actually the beginning of dawn.

    The kabbalists understood this significance of the middle of the night, and so instituted the practice of the midnight vigil, waking up to study Torah at midnight. Some think that this was possible due to the discovery of coffee, or that before electric lighting humans tended to sleep in two batches, with a period of waking in between, but whatever the historical reason, the kabbalists thought of midnight as a time of special power, when God turns to the world in love, when, if you are studying Torah, you can get swept up in God’s mercy and compassion.

    The Zohar, the great 13th Century work of Jewish mysticism, captures this idea in its own very poetic way:

    Afterwards, when the sun should set,
    the night shines and comes and takes the sun.
    Then, all the gates close, donkeys bray, and dogs bark.
    When half the night is through, the King begins to rise and the queen begins to sing.
    The King comes and knocks on the palace’s gate and says,
    “Open for me, my sister, my wife.”
    And then He plays with the souls of the righteous.
    Happy is he who has awakened at that time with words of Torah. For this reason, all the children of the queen’s palace must rise at that time and praise the King. All praise before Him, and the praise rises from this world, which is far from Him, and this is more pleasing to the Creator than anything.
    -Zohar on Parashat Beshalach

    Through the twin practices of study and prayer, you can be counted among the children of the queen’s palace, the embodiment of the people of Israel in a romantic relationship with the King of Kings.

    For redemption isn’t just freely given - it has to be earned.

    The kabbalists tried to earn that salvation nightly with prayer and study, the Israelites had to earn it with signs of devotion, with the paschal lamb and marking the doorposts with blood.

What does this mean for us today?

    I'm not necessarily advocating midnight study - though far be it from me to stop you - and certainly this tradition has impacted the halacha of the Seder, as there is a rule that we have to finish eating by midnight.

    More importantly, we are presented with two options when faced with midnight, with the darkest and lowest points in our lives, a Cinderella model vs. an Exodus model.

    Both midnights have their evil, dangerous aspects, but Cinderella emphasises that the dream is over, that it is the darkest moment, while Exodus and the Zohar wants us to see this moment as the beginning of the dawn, the first step towards the light.

    The world can seem bleak, it can really wear at our souls, make us seem powerless, helpless, like we don’t understand and can’t do anything. All too often we may feel like the world has reached its nadir, its midnight point.

    But Jewish tradition wants us to see this as an opportunity, a chance to do something, to be counted among the holy, among the children of the Queen’s palace. When the world seems darkest is when we are called to act - set slaves free, bring truth and liberty, freedom and peace, work to bring justice to the oppressed, connect to God and your family, bring about redemption in whatever small ways you can. In so doing we can fight off the midnight and bring about the dawn.

    As Yannai’s poem ends, we pray for a redeemed world:

    “Bring close the day that is neither day nor night
Exalted One, make known that Yours is the day and Yours is also the night
Appoint guards for Your city, all day and all night.
Brighten like the light of the day the darkness of night.
And it came to pass at midnight.”

When to Break Boundaries - Acharei Mot - Mythic Torah

2014-04-10T11:29:00.002-04:00

Welcome back to Mythic Torah, my regular article investigating monsters, heroes and gods in the weekly Torah reading. This week's reading is Acharei Mot, the 6th reading of the book of Leviticus, that deals with the ritual of the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, as well as laws of forbidden sexual relationships.

The Death of Nadav and Avihu

When I started this Mythic Torah project back in January, I knew that some weeks would be easier to deal with than others. I knew that Genesis would be plain-sailing, and could finish off my year of Mythic Torah with a bang. Exodus felt pretty comfortable, and I was pretty sure I had a lot to say about most of Numbers and quite a few parashiot of Deuteronomy.

It was Leviticus that really scared me.

How was I going to find something mythological to write about every week when the theme, over and over again, is sacrifices, purity and the priesthood?

While I've managed to find something to say so far, there was always a beacon of hope, one story that I knew I'd be able to write about - the death of Nadav and Avihu, two of Aaron's sons.

But when Shemini rolled around 3 weeks ago, that relates how they died, I found I had another idea altogether, and so held off the discussion of their deaths until this week's parasha of Acharei Mot, which literally means after the death and tells about the first Yom Kippur ritual designed to cleanse the sanctuary.

What I find fascinating is that this week's parasha seems to disagree with Shemini about the cause of their death.

In Lev 10, we read that Nadav and Avihu came into the Tabernacle to offer 'strange fire', fire that was unauthorised somehow (though exactly what the problem was is a little unclear). In this week's reading of Acharei Mot we get a rather different take (Lev 16):

א וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָֹה אֶל-משֶׁה אַחֲרֵי מוֹת שְׁנֵי בְּנֵי אַהֲרֹן בְּקָרְבָתָם לִפְנֵי-יְהוָֹה וַיָּמֻתוּ:
ב וַיֹּאמֶר יְהֹוָה אֶל-משֶׁה דַּבֵּר אֶל-אַהֲרֹן אָחִיךָ וְאַל-יָבֹא בְכָל-עֵת אֶל-הַקֹּדֶשׁ מִבֵּית לַפָּרֹכֶת אֶל-פְּנֵי הַכַּפֹּרֶת אֲשֶׁר עַל-הָאָרֹן וְלֹא יָמוּת כִּי בֶּעָנָן אֵרָאֶה עַל-הַכַּפֹּרֶת:

1] The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they came close to the Lord and died. 2] The Lord said to Moses: ‘Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Holy behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die. For I will appear in the cloud over the ark cover.

Thus the problem was not that Nadav and Avihu did something ritually wrong, but that they came too close to God, and in doing so they were consumed by God's fire.

Throughout the Bible we see that coming too close to the divine can lead to death (e.g. Uzzah in 2 Samuel 6 who touched the Ark of the Covenant accidentally and was killed by God, or the repeated statement that you cannot see God's face and live, as in Exodus 33:20).

This boundary line between human and divine is stressed to be extremely important and is in fact often policed by what we might call monsters.

Both the Garden of Eden and the Ark of the Covenant are guarded by Cherubs (that I wrote about here), four-faced composite creatures that are part human and part animal, that are about as far from a cute fat baby with wings as you can be. The Cherub at the gates of Eden is imagined literally, while the ark's cherubs are sculpted in the manner of a footstool for God, but the placing of these creatures, standing at the border between the human and the divine, sends a message. This is a border which must be protected and kept firm - as Nadav and Avihu discover, crossing that line has severe consequences.

But who is being protected? Is God being protected from our presence? or are we being protected from divine fire?

Genesis 3 suggests that the Garden of Eden has to be protected from us, to stop human beings becoming too much like God through eating of the tree of life. But Acharei Mot suggests that the protection is for us as well, that stepping into God's realm is too much for human beings to survive.

The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen wrote a defining article on monster theory (which I have referred to here), and his 5th thesis is that monsters police the borders of society, and have the function of showing the problem with curiousity, encouraging people to stay within the bounds of normal culture and normative behaviour. Monsters as diverse as Frankenstein's and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park reveal this trend in our literature and culture - don't be too curious, don't push the boundaries too much, don't try to 'play God'.

So is the Torah trying to say the same thing? Is Nadav and Avihu meant to be a cautionary tale about innovating in Jewish rituals?

Intuitively, I think we understand what it might mean to get too close to the divine and be consumed by God's fire. We've met people who seem to have been totally consumed by religious fervour, who maybe grew up secular but have discovered religion and thrown themselves completely into it. There is a danger there to be avoided, a fire of the divine that can destroy us.

But the second verse of Acharei Mot shows that this is not just a cautionary tale, warning us to never touch the holy, but rather an introduction to how we can touch the divine safely. Aaron can't enter the Holy of Holies whenever he wants - God's presence makes it too dangerous - but Aaron can do so when the time is right, on Yom Kippur.

A safe time and place is given for the divine and the human to meet.

Nadav and Avihu died because they crossed boundaries that should not have been crossed, but Acharei Mot doesn't want us to fear crossing borders altogether. In fact, we are mandated to reach out to the holy, to connect with God, but not to do so without preparations, without proper thought and intention.

I think Jewish law, halacha, is the same way.

We could permit everything, declare that there is no such thing as non-kosher food, or that prayer is no longer required, but this seems to me to be crossing boundaries between the sacred and the secular, blending distinctions that are important, useful and perhaps even necessary.

But we shouldn't let this fear of breaking boundaries prevent innovation where innovation is necessary, just that we should approach this crossing of borders with respect, with the right preparations, and nevertheless with a certain trepidation.

When Judaism innovates to include women in ritual practice, for example, or to allow for same-sex wedding ceremonies, I believe we are following the mandate to push boundaries, and in doing so we can bring the human and the divine together without getting burned.

Pestilence: Leprosy vs. Black Goo - Metzorah - Mythic Torah

2014-04-03T11:44:00.003-04:00

Welcome back to Mythic Torah, my regular article investigating monsters, heroes and gods in the weekly Torah reading. This week's reading is Metzorah, the 5th reading of the book of Leviticus, that deals with purity/impurity laws surrounding leprosy in people and houses, as well as menstruation.

The Venom Symbiote, Spider-man 3

There's a common science-fiction trope in which a black, viscous substance infects people and takes over their bodies. X-files, Helix, Prometheus and Spider-man all feature a threatening Black Goo that corrupts and spreads with a reason and purpose we can't really comprehend.

The black oil functions as disease given corporeal form, a physical manifestation of our greatest fears about illness, as human beings get infected and lose control of our bodies. This ichor can't be reasoned with or spoken to, it is a faceless, relentless force that can never be entirely gotten rid of.

Magic: the Gathering has its own example of this trope that is particularly relevant for our Torah portion of Metzorah - the Phyrexian oil. Magic's Phyrexians are an infectious, invasive force that consumes and compleats people, animals, plants and whole worlds and environments. It is a living, intelligent disease that corrupts not only living beings but rocks and planets, and as long as a single drop survives Phyrexia can be reborn.

Metzorah stands in interesting contrast with this trope. Our Torah reading is concerned about illness, and in particular Tzara'at (translated as leprosy but certainly not our modern disease that has the same name) that can infect both people and houses, rendering both impure and requiring various diagnoses and rituals to remove the problem.

And yet we never get a sense that the Tzara'at is a being, or is caused by a being, acting with intention. Where the Black Goo acts as if it has intelligence, one that may be beyond our comprehension, Tzara'at is presented without personality or a sense of purpose - it just happens.

This might strike you as obvious - and indeed it may fit well with our modern sense of disease - but it is not the only way that sickness is presented in the Bible.

Let me introduce you to Resheph, the god/demon of disease.

Deuteronomy 32, the Song of Moses, speaks about God punishing the people after they sin:

²³‘I will heap calamities on them
    and expend my arrows against them.
²⁴I will send wasting famine against them,
    consuming resheph and deadly plague;
I will send against them the fangs of wild beasts,
    the venom of vipers that glide in the dust.

Phyrexian Unlife, from Magic: the Gathering

Usually translated as pestilence, Resheph is part of the package of affliction that God will send against Israel, coupled with famine and wild beasts. Note the connection being drawn here between God's arrows and the Resheph, an important image of disease deities and demons, that can also be seen in Psalm 76:4, that talks about Rishphei-Kashet that seems to mean the Reshephs of the bow (Psalm 78:48 also uses the word in the plural).

But it is Habakkuk 3 that presents the most troubling image of Resheph in the Bible (the same chapter I discussed here in relation to Leviathan):

³God came from Teman,
    the Holy One from Mount Paran.
His glory covered the heavens
    and his praise filled the earth.
⁴His splendour was like the sunrise;
    rays flashed from his hand,
    where his power was hidden.
⁵Plague went before him;
    Resheph followed his steps.

The idea that diseases are spread before and behind God as He marches with His Glory is a very difficult image, though one that makes more sense when you think of the plague and the pestilence here as supernatural beings that literally go before God in His entourage, not impersonal illnesses. This idea was known to the rabbis of the Talmud, who say in Berachot 5a on Deut 32:24 that 'Resheph only means demons'.

Resheph in the Bible seems to be almost demonic being, one that has been de-mythologised to various extents in different places into the notion of 'pestilence' but retaining the idea of an archer deity, that strikes people down with burning arrows of disease.

Other near-Eastern mythologies share this threatening, powerful figure. The Ugaritic texts attest to a deity called Resheph, who is connected to Nergal, God of the Underworld, and functions as a gatekeeper to the world of the dead. He is a god of plagues and war, spreading death and destruction through his arrows.

The Bible then sits in a very interesting hybrid place (as is so often the case). On the one hand we have Resheph presented as a demonic, destructive being, a personified archer of pestilence and disease, like the Black Goo that has an agenda of its own. On the other hand we see sickness presented abstractly and without personification, something that makes you impure as a brush with death usually does, but not a being to be petitioned or reasoned with.

The black oil from Prometheus

What does this have to do with Metzorah?
Leviticus is interested in the question of how we can fix what has gone wrong - how can we return to God when something has come between us? How can we become pure and holy when the world is full of impurity?

Our Torah reading does not want us to think of Tzara'at, or sickness in general, as a demonic force but rather as just something that happens to us, something requiring treatment. For Metzorah, the realm of the divine is not one that has disease in it - sickness is a source of impurity and thus beyond the realm of God and the sacred.

The Black Goo of Science-Fiction is so scary because it cannot be stopped, cannot be reasoned with, and corrupts with intention and without mercy - and it is effective as an image because sometimes disease feels that way. We may feel like a demonic force has hunted us down, deliberately hit us with sickness.

But Metzorah wants us to think about disease impersonally, as just something that happens, something that has to be dealt with and overcome. Yet what may seem like a more scientific approach, nevertheless locates Tzara'at within a framework of religion and ritual.

We may no longer believe in pestilence as a personified being, but nevertheless sickness has a spiritual connection that we have perhaps lost touch with. It is a brush with death that may cause us to reorient our lives one way or another, that may call into question our beliefs about God and the world.

The demon Resheph and Metzorah's Tzara'at calls us to think of disease as a religious issue, something to be confronted and discussed in our sacred communities.

Eros, Creation and Holiness - Tazriah - Mythic Torah

2014-03-27T17:00:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to Mythic Torah, my regular article investigating monsters, heroes and gods in the weekly Torah reading. This week's reading is Tazriah, the 4th reading of the book of Leviticus, that deals with purity/impurity laws surrounding birth and leprosy.

If you had to write a creation myth, what would be your basic image? How would the world come into being?

When Tolkien answered this question, writing the Ainulindalë that begins his most mythic work of fiction, the Silmarillion, he had the world created out of music and song. Illuvatar, the chief of the Ainur, the gods of Middle Earth, has all the ainur join in a song before presenting them with the work of their artistry:

"But when they were come into the Void, Ilúvatar said to them: ‘Behold your Music!’ And he showed to them a vision, giving to them sight where before was only hearing; and they saw a new World made visible before them, and it was globed amid the Void, and it was sustained therein, but was not of it. And as they looked and wondered this World began to unfold its history, and it seemed to them that it lived and grew. And when the Ainur had gazed for a while and were silent, Ilúvatar said again: ‘Behold your Music! This is your minstrelsy; and each of you shall find contained herein, amid the design that I set before you, all those things which it may seem that he himself devised or added."
-The Silmarillion

Tolkien's vision of creation through singing is a powerful statement of creation through art, and art as creation. It is an abstract kind of creating, that arises from the mind and soul before being expressed through vocal chords and sounds.

But almost all mythologies of the ancient near east went in very different directions, choosing instead one (or both) of two basic motifs - sex and combat.

I've spoken a fair amount about the combat motif of creation, in which the earth is carved from the carcass of a slain monster such as Tiamat (in Babylonian myth). But with our parasha's interest in the process of procreation, Tazriah seems a good time to look at the other kind of creation.

Gaia by Feuerbach, 1875

Most versions of this kind of creation myth involve a male sky deity and the female earth having relations. The Greek story of Gaia (earth) and Uranus (sky) giving birth to the first generation of gods, chief among them Cronus, is a good example.

Hesiod describes this in his Theogony:

And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods... afterwards she lay with Heaven and bore deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronus the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire.

Egyptian mythology also has a sexual creation myth, though instead of a male and a female principle, the great god Atum creates the universe in an act of masturbation.

What about the Bible?

Genesis 1's creation story ultimately is a lot more similar to Tolkien's version (that it certainly inspired) than to the sexual creation myths of Greece or Egypt. We've looked at some similarities between our creation and that of Babylon's Enuma Elish, in which the world is created through slaying Tiamat and splitting her carcass into two parts, but all overt combat elements have been removed and there are no sexual aspects at all.

So what about the second creation story, in Genesis 2-3?

This version begins with the line: "These are the generations (Toldot) of heaven and earth in their creation" (Gen 2:4). Toldot in other contexts implies procreation and children, but here there is nothing explicitly sexual, though there are other hints (the large amounts of water, the fertility symbols of trees and fruit, the concern about rain falling and watering the earth).

What does all this have to do with Tazria?

Where the Greeks have Aphrodite, the Canaanites had Astarte and the Babylonians had Ishtar, the Jewish Bible has very little sense of the holiness of sex. While relics remain in our scriptures of God going to war with the primeval chaos monster, we have almost no relics of a sexual creation story, that might enshrine physical relationships at the heart of the sacred. Instead, intercourse leads to impurity, the primary focus of the opening of this week's reading:

"1] The Lord said to Moses, 2] ‘Say to the Israelites: “A woman who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son will be ceremonially unclean for seven days, just as she is unclean during her monthly period."

Even without pregnancy and birth, genital discharges, even normal, healthy ones, cause impurity and requires immersion in a mikvah before a person can enter the Sanctuary.

For the Bible then, sex and procreation is like death - a normal part of life certainly, but a part of it that should be kept separate from that which is holy, that which is pure.

This view may sound both resonant and deeply challenging for us today. In our normal lives we tend to hide away the sexual, considering it an extremely private matter and a taboo subject for much of polite conversation. On the other hand, there is a tendency to elevate sexuality to the highest of human experiences, something to be celebrated and even worshipped.

The Torah's view of sex, that it is normal but to be kept away from the holy, reminds us that human physical experience isn't the pinnacle of reality, that there is more to life than the flesh and pleasures of the body. Sex may be great but it isn't kadosh, holy.

And yet by including it, along with graphic descriptions of leprosy, Tazriah shows a realistic world, one with blood and sweat and tears, far from the intellectual, abstract vision of Tolkien's universe that emerges from his creation myth.

We are physical beings, living physical lives that are messy, and beautiful, and gross - but the Torah gives us a path to transcend that physicality, an opening to go beyond our limited experience to embrace the holy, the pure, and the infinite.

Purim, Wine & Dionysus - Shemini - Mythic Torah

2014-03-20T13:11:00.000-04:00

The Talmud (Megillah 7b) tells a great story about two rabbis that get drunk together on Purim:

Rabbah and Rav Zeira made a Purim feast together. They got drunk, and Rabbah stood up and killed Rav Zeira. On the morrow, Rabbah prayed for him and he came back to life!

The following year, Rabbah said to him: ‘Come, let's celebrate the Purim feast together again!’ Rav Zeira replied: ‘No thanks, miracles don't happen every day.’

Now that it's a few days after Purim, I hope you've recovered from any ill-effects from over-indulging, though I suspect your hangovers may not compare with Rav Zeira being murdered by his friend, only to be resurrected the next morning - now that's a hangover.

While I suspect that this story is meant to be something of a joke, it highlights a tension in Judaism about wine and alcohol - one the one hand these two rabbis celebrate the festival of Purim together by getting drunk, fulfilling Rava's teaching that you are supposed to get drunk on Purim until "you don't know the difference between 'Blessed be Mordechai' and 'Cursed be Haman'".

On the other hand we see here the potential for drinking, even in the context of religious celebration, to lead to out of control, violent behaviour.

Jews are permitted to drink alcohol, and we use wine as a central part of our most important rituals - shabbat, festivals, marriage and so on - and yet we know how dangerous alcohol can be.

So what is the place of wine and alcohol in Jewish mythology and ritual?

In Shemini, our parasha this week, two of Aaron's sons, Nadav and Avihu, are consumed by divine fire as they bring an offering to the Tabernacle, a topic that we will investigate more thoroughly in a few weeks when we reach Acharei Mot.

This is followed by rules that are to bind Priests in their work, including an important regulation about drinking wine (Lev 10:8-11):

8] Then the Lord said to Aaron, 9] ‘You and your sons are not to drink wine or other fermented drink whenever you go into the tent of meeting, or you will die. This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, 10] so that you can distinguish between the holy and the profane, between the impure and the pure, 11] and so you can teach the Israelites all the decrees the Lord has given them through Moses.’

This rule is placed so close to the story of the death of Nadav and Avihu that, beginning with Rabbi Ishmael in Vayikra Rabba, their deaths have been attributed to being drunk when they entered the sanctuary.

Why is this rule given? What's the problem with a priest working in the Tabernacle after having drunk wine or strong drinks?

It seems that the problem here is that alcohol blurs the distinctions between things. Once a priest's judgement has been somewhat inhibited by wine, Leviticus seems very concerned that they won't be able to make proper distinctions between that which is kodesh (holy) and that which is chol (profane) or tameh (impure) and tahor (pure).

Drunkenness often functions to blur divisions between things, to make a person less careful in their actions while they may start to see how everything is connected together. In Jewish thought, holiness is all about separation, setting something aside as unique and special - but drinking crashes through all these divisions, both in reality and in the mind of the person. The tabernacle is all about these distinctions, marking out space as holy and devoted to God - it seems that this is the last place that we should be having alcohol.

The Bible as a whole is very ambivalent about drunkenness.

Noah is the first human being to get drunk and this act leads to him getting molested/raped/castrated by his son (Genesis 9:20-29), while Proverbs warns a few times against getting drunk (Prov 23 warns that drunkenness and gluttony lead to poverty).

Proverbs 31 is very interesting in this regard, suggesting that wine makes kings and rulers err in judgement, while for the poor it can help them forget their suffering. We see again the idea of alcohol causing flawed-judgement and the blurring of lines - good for someone who is suffering, perhaps, but not for someone who has to make decisions of law and justice.

On the other hand, Psalm 104 tells us that wine gladdens the heart, while wine is among the produce that God promises is abundant in the Promised Land and a reward for righteous behaviour (Deut 11).

We even see that wine was part of the offerings in the Tabernacle (Leviticus 23).

And yet, the festival of Purim, which is most closely associated with getting drunk in rabbinic Judaism, is in the Bible much more ambiguous. While the characters are often at parties and feasts, the drinking seems to lead to everyone making bad decisions - Ahasuerus and Vashti, Haman at Esther's parties. People get angry, or relax their guard, and trouble follows.

Purim in Judaism today may be a festival of parties, feasting and drinking, but in the Bible any such festival is conspicuously absent, and little mythic power is attributed to wine and alcohol.

Caravaggio's Bacchus

This was not the case for the Greeks.

Dionysus, also known as Bacchus, was the Greek god of wine and ecstasy, a very popular god who had cults and temples across the ancient world. His rites were marked by excess, feasting and drinking into states of uncontrolled abandon. All things that are chaotic, uncontrolled or ecstatic fall under his domain. Dionysus is linked with Centaurs and Satyrs, human-animal hybrid creatures that give themselves totally over to revelry and carnal pleasures, highlighting the animal aspect of this god that we see within ourselves.

In the Ancient Greek world, Dionysian cults were extremely popular and widespread. Apart from the primal joy and fun of indulging, there seems to have been a strong element of the religious, euphoric experience that can be brought on by alcohol, revelry and giving yourself over to your 'animal' side.

If a key aspect of religious experience is feeling part of something much larger than yourself, alcohol cuts through the boundaries your sober self maintains between you and others, between your animal desires and your intellectual restraint, allowing you to lose yourself in an orgy of indulgence.

The Bible seems to be very nervous about this kind of religion. Drink wine, we are told, enjoy it, but don't drink when you're doing something which actually matters. Don't drink when you are serving God, or passing judgements, because that's when we need strict divisions between things, and absolute clarity about what is right, and what is wrong.

Yet we also know that we are to bring this aspect of ourselves to God, to offer wine in the sanctuary, pour it on the altar. Our animal urges are themselves from God, and deserve a place in our ritual lives, even as their use is circumscribed and contained.

Purim, with its drinking and partying culture, is a late Jewish take on the Dionysian revelries, finding religious meaning and significance in the blurring of boundaries, even between blessing heroes and cursing villains.

Priests vs Clerics - Tzav - Mythic Torah

2014-03-13T23:18:00.001-04:00

http://patrickmcevoy.deviantart.com/

"Magic User, Fighter, Thief, Ranger, Bard or Cleric?"

I may have let the cat out of the bag in the last few weeks about some of my geekier interests and hobbies, but for parashat Tzav it's time to delve into another - Dungeons and Dragons (and other tabletop role-playing games).

D&D is a fantasy role-playing game in which each player creates a character to be their avatar in the game world, each character is defined by statistics, abilities, level, alignment and, most crucially for our discussion today, a class. Each class has its own strengths and weaknesses - a fighter would be good at hand to hand combat but not best at sneaking past foes unseen, while a Magic User could draw on a potent range of spells but were weak if caught in combat.

Clerics were an interesting bunch. They had combat potential and could wear armour, they could call on their deities to banish the undead, and most importantly, they could always be relied on for healing spells. As long as a cleric was true to the strictures of their god (whichever god that might be), their powers were essential for keeping the party alive and in one piece, while a party without a cleric might struggle to make it to the final encounters with only a few hit points to spare.

And of all the stats that a D&D character has, it was Wisdom that was the Clerics most important characteristic.

As a student Rabbi, I like the idea that a cleric's main role is in wisdom (though I suspect Intelligence, Charisma and Constitution are also pretty important). A rabbis role is to learn our sacred texts and bring them to the people so they are accessible, meaningful and transformative.

But what about the Cohanim?

You become a priest because your father was one. That's it.

Parashat Tzav is concerned about priests, as it marks the moment when Moses anoints Aaron and his sons kicking off the hereditary priesthood, where every Cohen is understood to be a descendant of Aaron and his sons.

We have, I think, a hesitancy at a hereditary leadership structure that is imbued with divine authority, rather than a system based on ability (though I think we ought to value Wisdom over Charisma), and this hesitancy is mirrored in the text. Leviticus 8:23 reads:

²³Moses slaughtered the ram and took some of its blood and put it on the lobe of Aaron’s right ear, on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot.

This moment, that marks the official beginning of the priesthood, is one of only 4 verses in the Torah with the long cantillation mark called 'shalshelet', a note that suggests hesitancy or reluctance. Perhaps Moses too is nervous about a priesthood based on birth. And yet God commands it, and Moses follows through.

Why? Why are the priesthood just a single family serving god regardless of their ability or merit?

Let's backtrack a little and compare our priesthood to another ancient system, that of Ancient Egypt. Now in Ancient Egyptian thought, Pharaoh didn't just represent the gods on earth, he was a god. In fact, he embodied many different gods throughout his existence - every living king was Horus, every dead king was Osiris.

But Pharaoh was also the mediator between the people and the gods, the ultimate priest for all of Egypt.

The scholar John Wilson wrote in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man:

"...if the king could represent a god, it is also true that the king could be represented by a man... state dogma might insist that the king was the sole priest for all the gods; but it was impossible for him to function every day in all the temples; that activity must be deputized."

Thus Egyptian priests participated in the ultimate priesthood as manifest in the king. They acted as Pharaoh in ritual matters, allowing the king to be symbolically everywhere at once.

But Israelite priests are different.

Aaron is Moses' older brother, and Moses himself is no king. The priesthood is represented as having preexisted any kind of monarchy, their relationship is between God and Israel, standing at the border between the two, mediating the border through appropriate sacrifices and cleansing.

Because the priesthood and the Levites don't represent the king, they represent the people.

We know that the Tabernacle is paralleled to the creation of the world, the same verbs are used in the construction of the mishkan as are used in Genesis 1, the Tabernacle is a miniature universe.

And the Priests are a microcosm of us.

We are born into this universe, with obligations towards God and man, without consideration for merit, wisdom or dexterity. Sometimes it goes well, and sometimes it goes badly, but that's all their is.

The Priests serve in the temple just as we serve in the world, and whether we are skilled, gifted or not at all, the call is the same.

To serve.

Magic Leviathans - A Gathering of Sea Monsters

2014-03-09T18:33:00.003-04:00


Let's see what we can find in Ula's Temple

To celebrate my 200th blog post here on Mythic Writing, I wanted to do something a little different. As became obvious in my Pekudei installment of Mythic Torah, I am a devoted fan of the collectible card game 'Magic: the Gathering', made by Wizards of the Coast.

Now Magic has a lot of different creatures in the game, from Armadillos to Zombies, but among my favourite, are of course, the Leviathans.

In Magic's 20 year history, there have been 15 different Leviathans printed (as well as Krakens, Serpents, Octopi, Fish, Merfolk and Cephalids), so I thought that I would run down the Biblical roots of these 15 Leviathans, and rank them from least to most Biblical in abilities, art and gameplay. Then I'm going to supply each of them with Biblical verse that would work as new flavour text.

Everyone with me? Then in reverse order:

All images are copyright of Wizards of the Coast

15] Segovian Leviathan - Legends
The only Magic Leviathan with an actual biblical quote falls right at the bottom of the list for one simple reason - it's tiny. At only 3/3, the Segovian Leviathan is the same size as a Hill Giant or Canyon Minotaur, whereas Leviathans should be world-consuming monstrosities, enormous creatures that dominate the board and your opponents.

A lesser sin is the card's depiction of a leviathan as a colourful fish. While later rabbininic sources imagine Leviathan as a fish (how else could it be kosher?) the Bible calls it a nachash, a snake, suggesting a creature far more reptilian.

It's since been stated that Segovia is a tiny plane where everything is miniature in size, explaining why the plane's largest inhabitant, its Leviathan, is only a 3/3, but this creature's diminutive stature is enough to earn the Segovian Leviathan last place on our list.

New Flavour Text:
"Will you play with him like a bird? And bind him for your young girls?"
-Job 40:29

14] Eater of Days - Darksteel
One strange feature of Magic Leviathans is that many of them seem to fly (usually without wings or any other obvious means of levitation), but this is not the cardinal sin of Darksteel's Eater of Days. I even appreciate the common trope of enormous downsides that keep getting printed on my favourite creature type (after all, only God can defeat the Leviathan, and you are just a planeswalker summoning a fearsome beast to your side).

But I can't get behind a Leviathan made of metal.

The Bible's image of Leviathan is so full of flesh and blood, scales and teeth, that an enormous flying metal worm just doesn't work. It barely has any kind of head, let alone multiple.

New Flavour Text:
"The folds of his flesh are tightly joined; they are firm and immovable."
-Job 41:15

13] Nimbus Swimmer - Gatecrash
You know what I just said about flying without wings? Well Nimbus Swimmer is the exception, the Leviathan that flies and has wings, a fact that earns it such a low place on this list. The Leviathan doesn't fly, but at least without wings it still looks like a sea serpent, gliding through the air as though through water.

Nimbus Swimmer looks more like a Drake than a Leviathan, with a big guppy mouth that looks far from fearsome.

The X in its mana cost on the other hand , meaning that it can be as big as you have mana to pay for it, is very evocative to me. This is a creature of potentially limitless growth and size, as is fitting the chaotic creature that is the Leviathan.

New Flavour Text:
"When he rises up, divine beings are terrified; at his thrashing they retreat."
-Job 41:17

12] Sky Swallower - Guildpact
Yes, it flies, but at least Sky Swallower looks like an enormous snake, the nachash of the sky bristling with teeth. Its body is covered in scales and barbs that make it look truly dangerous.

And then there's that downside - give away every other permanent on your side of the battlefield. This is the ultimate in boundary transgression, obliterating all sense of borders between objects. Before I had stuff and you had stuff, now you have all the stuff and only the Leviathan is on the outside.

A striking image, no doubt, but still. Flying.

New Flavour Text:
"I made the sand a boundary for the sea,
an everlasting barrier it cannot cross.
The waves may roll, but they cannot prevail;
they may roar, but they cannot cross it. "
-Jeremiah 5:22

11] Simic Sky Swallower - Dissension
Last of the flying Leviathans, the Simic Sky Swallower earns a higher place on our list both for its awesome art (like the vanilla Sky Swallower before it, its serpentine body is covered in teeth, scales and barbs) but also for its gameplay.

Unlike any other Leviathan, the Simic Sky Swallower has Shroud, meaning that it can't be the target of spells and abilities. This works perfectly with Job 40-1 that is all about how you can't catch Leviathan or fill it with barbs.

The fact that this is the only Leviathan that was good in competitive Magic may have helped its position somewhat as well...

New Flavour Text:
"Can you fill his skin with barbs? And with a fishing-spear his head?"
-Job 40:31

10] Inkwell Leviathan - Conflux
We're past the flying Leviathans but not yet done with those made of metal. While the Eater of Days comes from Magic's original metal plane of Mirrodin, this enormous monster emerges from the etherium heavy part of Alara that is known as Esper.

It has a lot going for it - it's enormous at 7/11, with the shroud that made the Simic Sky Swallower so exciting, as well as Islandwalk and Trample, both mechanics that make sense with enormous sea monsters.

The art is exciting, with the gigantic metal leviathan bursting from the waves and leaping over a lighthouse, and even the flavour text is powerfully mythic - this is a monster that swallows seas that are never seen again while the world endures.

But while the Inkwell Leviathan may have flesh and blood parts (it is Blue as well as an artifact) its metal nature just doesn't sit well with me, earning it a low place on this list.

New Flavour Text:
"His bones are as pipes of brass; his limbs are like bars of iron."
-Job 40:18 (okay I'm cheating, this quote is really about Behemoth).

9] Grozoth - Ravnica

The plane Ravnica certainly has some strange Leviathans. The same place that is home to both Sky Swallowers, and the Nimbus Swimmer, is also the home of this... thing.

I used to think that it was a leviathan whose name was Grozoth, but it isn't Legendary, meaning somehow, somewhere, there is more than one Grozoth - but what is a Grozoth? Why does it have defender (meaning that it can't attack) unless you pay 4 mana? Why does it let you search out lots of other 9 cost cards from your deck? And what connection does this Leviathan have with the Dimir guild (note the watermark and the Dimir Transmute ability)?

The Dimir are supposed to be the most secretive and mysterious of all the guilds, composed of spies, rogues and assassins. What use does the guild of subterfuge have with a 9/9 Leviathan?

And yet the Grozoth has earned a spot near the middle of the list because its the only Leviathan in Magic that looks like it might have many heads, and that alone takes it to 9th place.

New Flavour Text:
You parted the sea by Your strength; You broke the heads of the sea monsters on the water.
-Psalm 74:13

8] Thing from the Deep - Portal
At our lists half-way point we meet the non-specific Thing from the Deep. Originally printed without a creature type, this was only later updated to be a Leviathan, a creature type that suits it nicely.

It may look a bit more like a giant fish than a serpent, but the Thing from the Deep's body is out of frame, allowing the possibility that it really is more snake than fish. It needs to be fed your own islands to allow you to attack with it, swallowing your own oceans if you want to bind it to your will.

But what really pushes it to the 8th spot on our list is the name - the Deep can only be a reference to the Biblical Tehom or the Babylonian Tiamat.

New Flavour Text
"I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep..."
-Proverbs 8:27

7] Jokulmorder - Coldsnap
With another serious downside mechanic we have Coldsnap's Jokolmorder, that earns a place in the top half of our list for one reason only - it's the biggest Leviathan on the list at a colossal 12/12. Only 7 creatures in the whole game are bigger!

It eats your islands when it enters the battlefield, but as you play more islands it is invigorated by the flow of water, untapping to strike down your foes with its 12 power and trample.

The Nordic name makes it sound more mythic, Norse mythology of course has its own sea monsters such as the world-serpent Jormungandr and various Krakens, but I can't really give it more points for it, as it isn't exactly Biblical.

Still, for being the biggest Leviathan in magic, Jokulmorder makes it into the top half of the draw.

New Flavour Text
"Nothing on earth is his equal – made as he is, without fear."
-Job 41:25

6] Kederekt Leviathan - Shards of Alara
From another shard of Alara, the place called Grixis, comes the Kederekt Leviathan. It's only a 5/5, which is pretty small as Leviathans go, and honestly I have no idea what's going on in the art - is it made of stone? or wood? Is that its mouth? or its snout? Or does it have lots of mouths?

And gameplay-wise, why does it bounce all other nonlands to their owners' hands? How does a Leviathan do that?

So given everything I just said, why did the Kederekt Leviathan get so high on the list?

It's because this is the only Leviathan that doesn't stay dead, because of its Unearth ability. Kill it once and it will just stay in your graveyard, lurking and waiting for an opportunity to come back from the dead and strike again.

The monster always returns!

New Flavour Text:
"On that day the Lord will visit with his sword, hard, great and strong, Leviathan the swift serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and He will slay the Sea Monster that is in the sea."
-Isaiah 27:1

5] Leviathan - The Dark
Magic's original Leviathan was the biggest creature at the time, at a gigantic 10/10, and came with a hefty mana-cost and a hard-to-swallow downside to match. Having to sacrifice 4 islands just to attack once with this creature made it very hard to play with, though if you have to swing more than twice you're probably doing something wrong.

Being the first Leviathan gets this creature high on the list, but the stunning art gets it to 5th place. With the body of an enormous serpent and the gaping mouth of a whale this creature looks mysterious and terrifying. It blends perfectly into the water, and yet beneath it is a house with the lights on. It's strange and otherworldly, just as the Leviathan should be.

New Flavour Text:
"Behind him is a luminous wake, he makes the deep seem white-haired."
-Job 41:24

4] Nemesis of Reason - Alara Reborn
Kederekt Leviathan is not Grixis' only sea monster. From the final set of the block, Alara Reborn, emerges the Nemesis of Reason, Magic's only Leviathan with an additional subtype. And a Horror is certainly what this creature is, as it drips with Lovecraftian flavour.

Just seeing this sea monster is enough to make you lose your mind, as every attack it makes reduces you to a gibbering wreck.

All very Call of Cthulhu, but what does this have to do with the Biblical Leviathan?

Honestly it's the flavour text that gets this creature so high on the list, because it suggests that the Leviathan is so nightmarish that stories cannot be written down about it, that words fail to be able to talk about it.

I've noted that the Bible never actually tells us the story of the Leviathan. It drops hints at ancient combat with God, at eternal imprisonment, at a creature that will one day rise again, but the story is never told, and I love the idea that the creature itself defies the possibility of telling its own story. Hence the Nemesis of Reason achieves the lofty heights of 4th place.

New Flavour Text:
Just blank space.

3] Marjhan - Homelands
We've reached the top three, and find another creature that was originally printed with a different creature type and only later did it receive errata joining it to the Leviathan tribe. Marjhan is an odd creature, from an odd set.

The Marjhan lives so deeply in the waters that it not only needs your opponent to have an island to attack, if you don't have any it dies. This sea monster also needs a stream of sacrificed creatures to energise it enough to attack your opponent.

It may look like a giant fish, but the Marjhan makes it into the top 3 because of its unique ability to do damage to creatures without flying. I had a really hard time understanding why a Leviathan would deal damage to creatures, but then it came to me - the Marjhan breathes fire (kind of).

For being the closest thing Magic: the Gathering has to a fire-breathing Leviathan, Marjhan gets 3rd place.

New Flavour Text:
"From his mouth streams firebrands, sparks of fire shoot out."
-Job 41:11 (though it would also need new art).

2] Trench Gorger - Commander

Jokulmorder may be the biggest leviathan naturally, and Nimbus Swallower may be as big as you have mana to play it, Trench Gorger is likely to actually be the biggest leviathan in play at any given time, especially in a game of Commander, the format he was designed for. Just last week I dropped a Trench Gorger into play, exiled almost every land from deck, and made him a 21/21 with trample. Now that's a big sea monster.

The art is almost note perfect - Trench Gorger looks terrifying and fearsome, with teeth and fins but not too much like a giant fish. The only thing missing are multiple heads.

But best of all is the mechanic - this Leviathan enters play and swallows all the water out of your deck, growing huge in the process. This is a monster made out of oceans, a creature that one could legitimately call Yam, the Sea itself.

New Flavour Text:
"Am I a sea, or a sea monster, that you set a watch over me?"
-Job 7:12

1] Stormtide Leviathan - Magic 2011
This is it - the most Biblical of all the Magic: The Gathering Leviathans - the Stormtide Leviathan, designed for the 2011 core set that tries to capture resonant fantasy tropes. It's playtest name was apparently Leviathan So Big (it raised the water level) and it's game play really captures the notion of a monster that brings a flood.

While it looks a bit fishy to me, its long snake-like tail makes up for it, and its ability to submerge the land in water is a very powerful image of the Leviathan that represents the primordial flood, just biding its time to cover the world in water.

The only creatures that can attack when the Stormtide Leviathan is in play are other sea monsters (those with Islandwalk) and creatures with flying, like Angels. We know, of course, that God flies on the backs of Cherubim - coincidence? I think not.

New Flavour Text:
"I am going to bring flood-waters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish."
-Genesis 6:17

So there you have it. For strongly Biblical gameplay, Stormtide Leviathan takes the crown as the most Biblically rooted of all the Leviathans in Magic.... until some more sets come out!

Food Fit For God - VaYikra - Mythic Torah

2014-03-06T14:38:00.001-05:00

Feasting in Valhalla

Does God need to eat?

Now you make think that the answer is 'obviously no', of course God, who has no corporeal body in any literal sense of the word, does not need physical sustenance from food and drink. But the Ancient Greeks, and other ancient cultures, would certainly have disagreed with you - the Gods of Olympus dined regularly on nectar and ambrosia in order to maintain their youth and immortality. In Norse mythology too, the Gods of Valhalla feast regularly alongside the Einherjar, the honoured dead who were slain in battle.

As we begin the book of Leviticus (VaYikra) with its long descriptions of the sacrifices that had to be brought in temple times in various life situations, we have to ask ourselves this question about the God of the Bible, and consider what the answer might mean about the Torah and its meaning for us today.

Why might we think that God eats?

Well, the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, that predates the Bible includes a really interesting description of how the gods relate to sacrifices, in an image that is both resonant and dissonant with this week's parasha.

When Gilgamesh finally achieves his quest to meet Utnapishtim, the immortal survivor of the flood (the Mesopotamian Noah character) to ask him how you can live forever, Utnapishtim tells him what happened at the time of the flood. He describes the boat he built to escape the torrents, the flood itself and the sending of the raven. And then, when the flood water finally subsides, Utnapishtim emerges into the air once more and offers a sacrifice to the gods:

"When the waters had dried up and land appeared,
I set free the animals I had taken,
I slaughtered a sheep on the mountaintop
and offered it to the gods, I arranged
two rows of seven ritual vases,
I burned reeds, cedar, and myrtle branches.
The gods smelled the fragrance, they smelled the sweet fragrance
and clustered around the offering like flies."
-Gilgamesh Book XI, adaptation by Stephen Mitchell.

The idea of smelling the sweet fragrance of the sacrifice appears after our flood narrative too, in Genesis 8:21, as well as in our parasha of VaYikra. In fact, a total of 9 times in this week's reading we are told that something is 'pleasing fragrance to God'.

The crucial difference is Gilgamesh's less than flattering image of the gods clustering on the sacrifices 'like flies', a gross image that suggests a physical connection between the gods and the flesh that is absent from the Biblical narrative.

By keeping to the image of smell and fragrance, the Bible has removed any sense of God physically needing or desiring the sacrifice itself.

We can see this trend quite powerfully in Psalm 50, that argues forcefully that sacrifices are not for food but rather meant to be a step towards behaving morally:

⁷‘Listen, my people, and I will speak;
    I will testify against you, Israel:
    I am God, your God.
⁸I bring no charges against you concerning your sacrifices
    or concerning your burnt offerings, which are ever before me.
⁹I have no need of a bull from your stall
    or of goats from your pens,
¹⁰for every animal of the forest is mine,
    and the cattle on a thousand hills.
¹¹I know every bird in the mountains,
    and the insects in the fields are mine.
¹²If I were hungry I would not tell you,
    for the world is mine, and all that is in it.
¹³Do I eat the flesh of bulls
    or drink the blood of goats?

¹⁴‘Sacrifice thank-offerings to God,
fulfil your vows to the Most High,
¹⁵and call on me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you will honour me.’

God doesn't eat or drink, says the psalmist, that isn't the point of sacrifices. Bring them anyway, but don't think that God needs them.

But while the Bible then seems to have steered clear of suggesting that God does eat, this psalm certainly reads like a polemic against people in Israel who believe just that. It certainly looks like some people in ancient Israel really believed that God could be hungry, and wanted the sacrifices as His portion.

What would this view of sacrifice entail?

To say that God gets hungry and that sacrifice is designed to satiate that hunger, is to say that God needs us in the same way that we need food is to have a very different relationship between us than we normally consider. It's to say that God is lacking in some way, that God is deficient and created us to fill that void.

VaYikra and Psalm 50 seem to be saying something different, and, to my mind, far more interesting. God doesn't need our sacrifices, but nevertheless God wants them. We should fulfil our vows to God through sacrifices, and the fragrance of them is pleasing to God, but if we didn't do them, the Bible tells us, God we be fine - it's us that would suffer.

Of course, we no longer perform sacrifices in Judaism. The korbanot (sacrifices) of Vayikra have been replaced in modern ritual life by things like prayer and study, devoting our time, our hearts and minds to God in place of the animals and grain of old.

We shouldn't think then, that we do these things for God. God does not need our prayer, or our learning - we do these things for ourselves, to reshape our personalities on the altar of Torah. We sacrifice ourselves, our time, resources and our ego to God, but not for God, but for ourselves.

And God smells the sweet fragrance of our sacrifices, and is pleased.

God of Fire and Forge - Pekudei - Mythic Torah

2014-02-27T12:12:00.004-05:00

Purphoros, God of the Forge by Eric Deschamps, from Magic: The Gathering

"Purphoros is the god of the forge, the restless earth, and fire. He rules the raw creative force of heat and energy that fills the souls of sentient beings. His energy emerges as chaos, something to be harnessed and shaped by labor and passion. For this reason, Purphoros is also the god of artisans, of obsession, and of the cycle of creation and destruction."
-Planeswalker's Guide to Theros

As much time as I spend thinking about Sea Monsters, I probably spend more thinking about Magic: The Gathering, the awesome collectible card game published by Wizards of the Coast. While I love games of all kinds, Magic has the amazing combination of endlessly varied gameplay, the opportunity to experiment and be creative, and unbelievable fantasy art, that it has become my absolute favourite.

The idea behind Magic, and other collectible card games, is that every few months a new set of cards comes out, giving you hundreds of new possibilities for building your decks, and each year the game is set on a different fantasy world.

Now given everything you know about me, you can probably imagine my excitement when I discovered that this year would be set on a world inspired by Greek mythology, a world called Theros. This rich fantasy world has an equally rich pantheon, and one of the major gods is called Purphoros, god of the forge.

As the quote above shows, Purphoros is both the god of fire and destruction, and the god of artisans and artistic creation, the god who creates powerful enchantments and artefacts, and the god of violent rage and consuming fire.

This combination of art and fire marks the end of this week's parasha of Pekudei. We've spend much of the last month reading about the plans and construction of the mishkan, the mobile tabernacle in the wilderness, and after we've read about all these artistic and creative works, God finally manifests in the holy sanctuary:

"For the cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day, and there was fire within it at night, before the eyes of the entire house of Israel in all their journeys."
-Exodus 40:38

I hope to talk about the clouds of God's glory another time, but this week I want to focus on the fire of God that burned in the mishkan at night, the fire that filled the magnificent work of the tabernacle, that blazed before the eyes of the whole house of Israel.

Why does God manifest as fire? How does this connect to the work of building the tabernacle?

Of course, Magic didn't get their ideas from whole cloth. In fact, Purphoros is directly inspired by the Greek god Hephaestus (Vulcan for the Romans), who was the blacksmith of the gods, in charge of making Zeus' thunderbolts and other weapons of war. Hephaestus was also the god of fire - volcanoes are named after him.

Fire has these two aspects, creative and destructive, life-sustaining and life-threatening. We need fire to heat our homes, to work metals and create tools that help us gain mastery over the natural world, to fire clay for pots and tiles. But fire out of control can destroy everything, burn down whole towns and cause untold pain.

As a substance, fire is also remarkable, neither solid nor liquid nor gas. To ancient minds, fire must have seemed almost supernatural, literally from the gods in the case of the Greek myth of Prometheus. Even to us today, when we may understand flames as a plasma, fires can be mesmerising and enchanting. We gather around bonfires at the end of camp, and toast marshmallows as we gaze into the flames, even while we're careful to keep our distance.

Divine Blueprint of Fire
I heard a midrash from my rabbi and teacher, Rabbi Barry Dov Katz, that when God first told Moses about the design for the tabernacle (found in Pesikta d'Rav Kahana 1:3), he showed him an image of what it should look like, made of red fire, green fire, black fire and white fire. Moses looked at this image and despaired of ever achieving this grand vision. He said: "Master of the Universe, where can I get red fire, green fire, black fire and white fire?"

The answer in the end is that human beings build the tabernacle from their own materials, the closest they can get to the divine vision of the multi-coloured fires, from gold, silver and precious cloths. And if we do that artistic work of creation, God will meet us where we are, and bring the fire down from heaven to complete the task.

The mythic idea of fire then, seems to be trying to teach us something about the artistic process, or creativity of any kind. We have a vision of what we are aiming for, an impossible vision of fire and flames that cannot exist in this limited physical world. This fire can be exciting, a strong motivator for action, but it can also burn us, paralyse us with fear. Knowing that anything I actually create can't live up to the vision I had, I may be unable to do anything at all - better to have the perfect idea in my mind than to give it form and discover the compromise that comes from making it reality.

And yet Pekudei tells us that when we give with our whole hearts, when we create with every part of our being, true to ourselves and the vision in our minds, there is the possibility that God will come down and fill it with fire. The completed work won't be the same as the idea itself, but it will nevertheless burn with divine flames.

One of the biggest reasons I love Magic: The Gathering is that it gives me a creative outlet in my life, a space to build decks inspired by all kinds of different ideas. While I don't have time at the moment to do as much writing as I would want to (and the revised draft of Radiance is still mocking me to complete it), I need at least some kind of outlet in my life for the fire of creative visions.

Purphoros, Hephaestus and the tabernacle teach us that creative work can be holy and sacred, an avenue to bring the divine flames into the limited physical world.

Cherubs and Empty Space - VaYakhel - Mythic Torah

2014-02-20T11:34:00.000-05:00

Kanizsa's Triangle

How many triangles are there in this picture?

There are several 'right' answers to this question, I think, but I'm most interested in the illusion of a white triangle pointed down at the center of the lines and circles. There isn't really a white triangle in this image, nor is there a secret magen david, a star of David. Instead the empty space is marked out through lines and sectors of circles such that your brain fills in the triangle.

Empty space is given structure and the illusion of form through its surrounding objects.

In this week's torah reading of Vayakhel, we see how the sacred space of the tabernacle is structured with wood, gold and cloth to create a form for the divine. Specifically, once we get to the holiest centre of the holiest space, we find the Ark of the Covenant, above which are two unusual figures (Ex 37):

⁷Then he made two cherubim out of hammered gold at the ends of the cover. ⁸He made one cherub on one end and the second cherub on the other; at the two ends he made them of one piece with the cover. ⁹The cherubim had their wings spread upwards, overshadowing the cover with them. The cherubim faced each other, looking towards the cover.

ז וַיַּעַשׂ שְׁנֵי כְרֻבִים זָהָב מִקְשָׁה עָשָׂה אֹתָם מִשְּׁנֵי קְצוֹת הַכַּפֹּרֶת:
ח כְּרוּב-אֶחָד מִקָּצָה מִזֶּה וּכְרוּב-אֶחָד מִקָּצָה מִזֶּה מִן-הַכַּפֹּרֶת עָשָׂה אֶת-הַכְּרֻבִים מִשְּׁנֵי (קְצוֹותָיו) [קְצוֹתָיו:
ט וַיִּהְיוּ הַכְּרֻבִים פֹּרְשֵׂי כְנָפַיִם לְמַעְלָה סֹכֲכִים בְּכַנְפֵיהֶם עַל-הַכַּפֹּרֶת וּפְנֵיהֶם אִישׁ אֶל-אָחִיו אֶל-הַכַּפֹּרֶת הָיוּ פְּנֵי הַכְּרֻבִים:

These Cherubim are left a bit vague in this passage - what do they look like? What are they doing on top of the Ark? But we get a bit more detail in Exodus 25, when we get the instructions for the work that is being done in our parasha:

²²There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of the covenant law, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites.

כב וְנוֹעַדְתִּי לְךָ שָׁם וְדִבַּרְתִּי אִתְּךָ מֵעַל הַכַּפֹּרֶת מִבֵּין שְׁנֵי הַכְּרֻבִים אֲשֶׁר עַל-אֲרוֹן הָעֵדֻת אֵת כָּל-אֲשֶׁר אֲצַוֶּה אוֹתְךָ אֶל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל:

God, then, speaks from this space between the cherub wings.

Why is this the space that we create for God? What are these Cherubs and what do they have to do with God?

First, you need to get chubby baby angels out of your mind. These Italian putti are really connected to Greek mythological imagery of Bacchus and his attendants and only in the late medieval period do they get connected to cherubs.

So what should we have in mind?

Unfortunately the Bible is very vague on the subject, but we do know they have two central jobs - firstly to guard sacred trees (Gen 3, 1 Kings 6, Ezekiel 28 and 41) or to act as bearers of the Divine Throne. We see throughout the Bible, especially the book of Psalms (80 and 99) that God is called Yosheiv Keruvim, the one who sits, or is enthroned, on the Cherubs. 2 Samuel 22 (and its parallel Psalm 18) tell us that God "...rode on a cherub and flew".

The Cherub acts as guardian and steed for the divine, the support for God's throne and the monster that prevents defilement or transgression.

What mythological creatures does this compare to in other cultures?

While the Egyptian and Greek Sphinxes get all the attention, there were also Sphinxes in ancient Mesopotamia, inspired by the Egyptians but given their own local spin. In particular, the Mesopotamian Sphinx was known as bearers of gods and kings, and used as decorations for all kinds of thrones. Temples would have elaborate Sphinx thrones above which would be the image of the deity itself, perhaps Baal Hamon or the goddess Astarte.

Now we can see just how striking the Jewish use of the cherubs is. Instead of an image of God resting on the cherubs, the tabernacle has nothing. Empty space.

And we are nevertheless told that this is where God will speak from.

Instead of an image of the divine, we are given an anti-image, a well-defined space that we could imagine is filled by God but, like the triangle illusion, there is nothing really there.

Yet the presence of the Cherubim tell us that there is something holy here, something to be defended and guarded from defilement (or perhaps something powerful and dangerous that we need to be protected from - see the story of Nadav and Avihu).

The 'Nothing' that rests above the Ark, is the most 'Something' that can represent God. It is only the illusion of physicality that can represent God in the physical world.

I think there is a message here for us too about creating sacred space within ourselves and within our lives.

If we think we know exactly what God is, exactly what God wants of us, then I think we are danger of turning God into an idol, obliterating the sacred emptiness within which God can dwell. If we fill our lives with constant activity and busy-ness, we miss the chance to connect with the divine spirit that dwells in emptiness and quiet.

Instead I think we are supposed to erect our own Cherubim, our own guardians of the borders of the emptiness, something that can define the space without becoming part of it. We can carve out time in our calendars for study or prayer, we can deliberately withhold making unwarranted assertions about God and what God wants.

In this way, perhaps we too can find the space in our lives from which God can speak.

Bulls - Ki Tissa - Mythic Torah

2014-02-13T21:18:00.000-05:00

Bulls.

They get a bit of a bad rap these days, known mainly for being an exclamation that something is not true, or for the name of some kind of sports team (I'm not a native in this country but I'm trying).

But back in the day Bulls were the height of prestige - symbols of wealth, strength and most importantly masculine virility.

Small wonder then that many gods of the ancient world were closely associated with calves and bulls. In Mesopotamian myth, there was Gugalanna, the Great Bull of Heaven slain by the hero Gilgamesh. While in the Ugarit (an area close to ancient Israel), the chief god El was worshiped as the Bull-El, and Baal, the storm god, was also associated with this masculine image.

In our Bible too we can see relics of this bull worship - Jacob is called 'bechor shor', firstborn of the ox in Deut 33:17, or Hosea 8, which reads as a critique of this worship of bulls.

But the most striking polemic against bull worship is in this week's parasha of Ki Tisa. Moses has gone up the mountain to receive the two tablets but the people get nervous, and turn to Aaron to make them a substitute:

4] Aaron took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’

ד וַיִּקַּח מִיָּדָם וַיָּצַר אֹתוֹ בַּחֶרֶט וַיַּעֲשֵׂהוּ עֵגֶל מַסֵּכָה וַיֹּאמְרוּ אֵלֶּה אֱלֹהֶיךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל אֲשֶׁר הֶעֱלוּךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם:

This passage should be read in conversation with 1 Kings 12, when Jeroboam sets up temples to God in the northern kingdom of Israel, as a rival to the temple in Jerusalem:

28] After seeking advice, the king made two golden calves. He said to the people, ‘It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem. Here are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’

This incident in the book of Kings, with its extremely similar wording (including the plural 'gods'), makes it pretty clear that what the Israelites wanted from their golden calf was not a god but a vehicle for God. The idea behind Jeroboam's calves was that they were a substitute for worshiping God so far away in Jerusalem, not that they were meant to represent a different god altogether.

So what was the problem then?

Why do so many Israelites get put to the sword for worshiping the golden calf when all it was meant to be was a representative of, or a vehicle for, God?

At one level, any representation of God is a problem, limiting the divine to the tangible, tying the infinite to something that can be owned and possessed. Small wonder then that when God gives instructions for a Tabernacle to be built, it is space itself that is the seat of God, the least tangible physical thing there is.

But I think the Torah is concerned particularly about bull worship.

Even today, we see signs of male virility and power being celebrated and idolised. The idea of male sexual potency dominates billboards, TV shows and movies, and even if its women being portrayed, they are often depicted in poses meant to titillate male heterosexuals.

The golden calf teaches us that sexuality and wealth should not be at the core of our worship, the centre around which we revolve. The tabernacle is covered in gold, but at the centre is the sacred empty space of the divine - at the centre of the golden calf is just more gold.