{"id":382,"date":"2012-02-21T18:53:14","date_gmt":"2012-02-21T22:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/?p=382"},"modified":"2012-02-21T22:31:25","modified_gmt":"2012-02-22T02:31:25","slug":"visioning-the-godly-in-true-blue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/?p=382","title":{"rendered":"Visioning the Godly in True Blue"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Studying Torah begins and ends with a sweet realization: These texts reveal new truths at each reading.\u00a0 The ancient authors of Torah knew that creating multiple possible realities was the very purpose of storytelling.<\/p>\n

Last week, our congregational Torah study group occupied itself with Parsha Mishpatim<\/em>, which includes the famed Book of the Covenant. \u00a0The Book of the Covenant, so scholars, likely began as a separate law code which was later integrated into a larger narrative composed by several different writers.<\/p>\n

Personally, I think we\u2019d be better off naming our writers \u201cschools,\u201d since the respective strands of text were themselves subject to internal revision before they were all redacted and re-redacted in later centuries.\u00a0 But scholars are notoriously wedded to their terminology.\u00a0 Hence, they call them the J,E,P, and D-writers, nodding in the general direction of a fifth R-writer for \u201credactor.\u201d \u00a0In this case, the E-writer (I\u2019d say E-school) is given credit for assimilating the Book of the Covenant into the E-narrative in Torah.<\/p>\n

Has everyone fallen asleep?<\/p>\n

Please don\u2019t. \u00a0The fact that ancient Israelites wrote and retained different versions of certain stories (Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3 are the paradigmatic example) is proof positive that there was no one authoritative account for all Israelites even in the old days.\u00a0 Some of Torah even \u201ccorrects\u201d other parts.\u00a0 Example?\u00a0 Just check out the way the pashal lamb is, according to Exodus 12:9, to be roasted.\u00a0 The same pashal lamb is to be boiled, according to Deuteronomy 16:7.\u00a0 Chronicles 35:13 offers an ingenious resolution to the apparent dichotomy: The lamb should be roasted after<\/em> being boiled.\u00a0 The Chronicler was bothered by discrepancies in the two earlier accounts and reconciled them with a brand-new recipe.<\/p>\n

Our ancient forbears preserved variant traditions even when they contradicted each other.\u00a0 That fact grants us the right to our<\/em> multiple interpretations: Torah is a flowing, changing, living thing because both then and now the people of that book understood their narratives, their law codes, and their ideas to be subject to change.<\/p>\n

That, I believe, is a very good thing.\u00a0 It has all sorts of wonderful implications.\u00a0 We can (and have) put women in the rabbinate.\u00a0 We can (and have) included GLBT Jews as members of our clergy.\u00a0 We can\u2026<\/p>\n

Well.\u00a0 The study group spent some quality time looking at the laws of the Book of the Covenant.\u00a0 We discussed how the law code aimed to protect property, land, and justice.\u00a0 Ancient Israelites were warned not to accede to a majority opinion rather than tell the truth.\u00a0 If required to give testimony, they were reminded neither to favor the wealthy nor the poor.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot in Parsha Mishpatim <\/em>that can make Jewish folk proud of their ancestors.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot to struggle with, too, just as ancient Israelites must have done.\u00a0 Take the literal possibilities of \u201can eye for an eye\u201d (Ex. 21: 23-4).\u00a0 There is no example in Tanakh of this law being applied, which strongly suggests that our ancestors didn\u2019t take this passage literally even way back then.\u00a0 Still, my Torah study group sadly noted the ways Exodus 22:17, \u201cYou shall not allow a witch to live\u201d was used in later centuries to justify persecution and murder on a grand scale \u2013 in some time periods, against Jews.<\/p>\n

At the end of our time together, I asked everyone to look again at the final passage of the parsha.\u00a0 Moses, the text tells us, ascends the mountain together with Aaron and his two sons, and seventy elders.\u00a0 There they see the God of Israel, under whose feet is the likeness of a lapis lazuli stone surface, the very image of the sky in clarity and purity.\u00a0 Miraculously, God did not raise God\u2019s hand against the all-too-human beings who dared appear where divinity could be seen. \u00a0Instead, the Torah tells us: \u201cThey beheld God and they ate and drank\u201d (Exodus 24:11).<\/p>\n

Most English translations of this passage do not do the Hebrew justice.\u00a0 The verb used here for \u201cseeing\u201d is formed from the root chet-zayin-hey<\/em>.\u00a0 Khazah <\/em>does not mean, simply, \u201csee.\u201d\u00a0 It implies visioning. \u00a0A khozeh <\/em>is a seer. \u00a0A khazon<\/em> is a vision.\u00a0 Those who were on that mountain visioned God, envisioned God, or had a vision of God.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, they ate and drank.<\/p>\n

I asked our study group to recall a time when they experienced Godness of some sort, to re-imagine a moment of divinity so powerful it simultaneously commandeered and sustained everything around them, including themselves.<\/p>\n

We are mere mortals, despite (or perhaps because) of our dreams.\u00a0 Must visionary experience inevitably give way to the everyday realm of assiyah<\/a>, <\/em>of doing?\u00a0 Must we eat and drink to remind ourselves of our mortality after an encounter with immortality, after entering the realm of atzilut<\/em><\/a>?<\/p>\n

Or did those who beheld God take in the vision by drinking in the experience, by nourishing themselves with the divine so that they could be changed utterly, body and soul?<\/p>\n

God\u2019s feet, the text says, rested on a foundation of sapphire.\u00a0 Sapir <\/em>recalls, for the Hebrew reader, a word made of the same essential letters: Samech-pey-reish<\/em> is a root used for \u201ccounting,\u201d \u201crelating,\u201d and \u201cwriting.\u201d\u00a0 A sofer <\/em>is a scribe.\u00a0 A s<\/em>efer <\/em>is written text, a book.\u00a0 The linguistic presence of these near homonyms in my mind made me ask the others: Was God standing on our story, on the narratives we have revered and struggled with for centuries?\u00a0 The Tanakh<\/em> is, after all, the foundation on which we build and rebuild our understanding of Godness.<\/p>\n

So we ended our discussion where we began: The Book of the Covenant, the law, the Torah, the Tanakh \u2013 it is sourced in many voices, many readings, many possibilities.\u00a0 What is godly stands, in significant measure, on that fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Studying Torah begins and ends with a sweet realization: These texts reveal new truths at each reading. The ancient authors of Torah knew that creating multiple possible realities was the very purpose of storytelling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[92,91,94,93,95,70],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-assiyah","tag-atzilut","tag-book-of-the-covenant","tag-mishpatim","tag-sapir","tag-tanakh"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":387,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions\/387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}