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magidLast night I went to hear Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg talk about the Creation and the idea of God's seducing of people, inducing desire. She spoke eloquently. This is based on my notes, which are far less eloquent and flowing, alas, and mostly does not cite her sources.
First, the word 'desire' is first used with Chavah, as part of her punishment, that women will desire their husbands, which makes an inherently unbalanced situation. Rashi says that part of desire is the inability to speak about some of the want, bringing in a further unbalancing element.
God can do anything by fiat, and does so at the beginning of Creation. However, this breaks down just before making man: the verse says "let us make man in our image", and she takes this to mean the plural, not the royal we, as it were. God is suspending His sovereignty and consulting others (whether angels, or the other animals, there are different opinions). After some time for allowing His want to be, He fulfills His wish. God is the master of desire, knowing the most about it.
Man was created "b'tzelem elokim," "in God's image." But how can we really be like God? In what sense are we like God? And how is Adam like us? At first, Adam is obviously unlike us, made from earth with spirit breathed into him. He first starts to sound similar after eating the fruit, when he starts making excuses.
Man was first created outside Eden, then moved inside (see Breishit 2:15). Rashi says on the verb there, vayikakh, that God took him with kind words and induced him to enter. In other words, how do you move a human? With words, with beautiful words, inducing action.
The root word l'fatot (take, in a sexual way) has the same root as peti, implying the imbalance of knowledge in a seduction. Which is a surprising word for Rashi to use.
And why would Adam need to be induced, seduced, into Eden? Why would he resist? Perhaps a premonition that he'll come out poorer than he went in? [There wasn't another answer suggested; it felt like there should be one.] In any case, God starts humans with an act of seduction.
(There are other places in Torah where seduction happens. Specifically, His convincing of Moshe for seven days at the burning bush, and when Sarai persuades Hagar to accept Avram.)
So Adam and Chavah are in Eden, naked and unashamed. What should follow is the story of how God clothes them. Instead, there is the story of the snake, desirous of Chavah after seeing Adam and Chavah sporting with each other.
The desire is already there, in Eden. God says man should have a helpmeet, but after this statement of intent, doesn't do it. Rather, He brings Adam to name all the animals. Adam names them, and the act of naming is an act of wisdom, to know what to name each one, to see it clearly. And Adam figures out that all the others come in pairs, that he should have a helpmeet, too. And he is lonely, desiring a mate. Then, once Adam has desired, then the mate can be made. God makes a situation to elicit Adam's awarness of singleness, then acts to alleviate it. Chavah comes out of Adam's unconsciousness, while he lies in a deep sleep, and God brings her to him, to name her as he named all the other animals. And now, now he recites poetry, describing her, and what she _will_ be called ('woman' being derived from 'man' (also in the Hebrew), mirroring her creation), but not giving her a name now. Finally he has found someone his, giving him a sense of relief. The poetry includes "bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh," and the Sforno points out that this refers to this time only, and never again. All other unions will be of a person finding someone who is other, and cleaving unto them, becoming one that way, not this sense of incest. (What is the cleaving to one another, after leaving the parents' house? Rashi sees it as a physical thing, the creation of a child together. Sforno sees it more metaphorically, how people marry someone compatible to them.)
The first generation was different. They have no father and no mother. They have no inner conflicts from family, how they were raised, and so on. They are not "of woman born." Chavah might even be seen as "of man born," certainly a situation that won't be repeated. Neither has a personal history; it is all surface. The Ramban says that they act on truth and falsehood, rather than good and evil. They didn't have da'at, desire, for good and evil. What brings them to this desire?
Ha-Emek Davar points out that the root of the word translated as 'unashamed', bet-shin-shin, is not bet-shin, shame, but delayed, to be late. Only people can be late, not animals, which do not have a sense of time that allows 'lateness.' And the first people didn't know about time lag, doing things later, being late, until after eating the fruit. At first, things were done immediately, without work. What came into the world with the knowledge, the desire, is a sense of time, the barriers of human consciousness. There is a depth of self, of emotions and other considerations, complex enough to delay action, not the simple and fast, doing things immediately. Before this, Adam is just who he is on the surface, he has no other selves to be. So is this a 'fall,' or an enrichment, or both?
[Source I didn't write down implies that] Consciousness comes with the first lie, with the first time one invents onself. Another source says that consciousness is not transparent, that one learns the distinction of self with the first time the world disagrees with what one knows, and that is the loss of paradise.
In the Torah, the expulsion is written as a throwing out, but not down, not a fall, and sin is not mentioned. God drives them out, a horizontal movement, perhaps a birth?
After eating, Adam and Chava are divorced from God, driven out lest they eat from the other fruit to regain that lost closeness. Instead, they must work towards closeness. And that work, that complexity can be rewarding.
The first dialogue is only after Adam eats. God initiates conversation. Why now? Before this, Adam named, and showed his wisdom. Now, we have conversation, showing more fallibility. Adadm makes excuses, shifts blame, on God for giving him Chava, and on Chava, for giving him fruit, but in the end also acknowledges the truth, that he ate. This is much more like how real people talk, making excuses, confessing, discussing. And when two are talking, the conversation is open to interpretation. There are multiple levels of truth here; how do we weigh Adam's words? This is the first time the vav-hahifuch, the Biblical form that changes a future into a past tense, is used in conversation, in reference to one's self. [She sees this as implying] Adam is saying that he has eaten, in the future he will have eaten, the tenses are not as separate as they might be. He will always be a person who had eaten the fruit.
God seduced Adam into language, and that loss of clarity and cogence and competence when one is seduced is a gain as well as a loss. The pre-articulate self has an intensity, that there is more within than can be expressed, which is lost when one becomes verbal. There is a sense of dpth, and a talker is a diminished self, if there's nothing left of the inarticulate self, nothing that is beyond words, beyond explanation. However, Adam and Chava are backward from all other people, changing from completely compenent to less articulate. When does Adam start to become less articulate? When he meets Chava. He doesn't actually name her until after eating the fruit. Chava isn't the 'mother of all,' not of the animals and other living things that have been created. Adam has named her in a paradoxical way (unlike the naming of the animals). She is the one who has brought him into safek, doubt, which is needed for life. Chava is the source of new complexity, a fall and a birth.
After eating the fruit, God talks to Adam and to Chava, but not to the snake. Why? According to [source], the snake is a master answerer. [Her gloss] And God is not interested in that conversation, where all will be answered (where God might be bested?).
What moves Adam and Chava from their idyll to the complexity of the real world? Seduction, the imapct of and evocativeness of another person. Chava is at the heart of the story, both seduced and seducer, both simleton and crafty.
Who else seduces? God does, as shown in Hosea and Jeremiah, that God seduces Israel, and God seduces the prophets, enticing them with words despite their resistance. This seducing blurs the line between the self and the other, as the one succumbs to the vision of the other.
If the snake wants to seduce Chava, why does he go to her first, rather than Adam (to get him out of the way first)? Rashi says that it's because women's minds are more persuadable, more open to other ideas (not the usual interpretation of being silly or light-headed). According to the Pirkei D'Rabbi Eliezer, the snake says that man is hard to move from his opinion. Which one would think would be a good thing, in context, but the proof text brought is from Naval, which is not a positive thing. Which implies there is a usefulness to being open to new ideas. Not just new ideas, but new emotions. Again according to the Pirkei D'Rabbi Eliezer, the Torah was offered to the women first, because men follow the opinions of their wives (and are otherwise intransigent).
And this openness comes from trust, trust that con move someone out of a place to another place, a new way of seeing, a new idea of religiosity, a new interpretation, seduction in more than just the sexual.
All the desire in the world comes from the desire of God. In Hullin, there is a proof that God wants the prayers of the righteous, prayer being the expression of human desire, asked of God for fulfillment, for compassion, to allow this want, to allow this seduction. Man creates in words the world he wishes for.
God seduces, rather than creating directly. Is the creating God 'superseded' by the desiring God? Perhaps the only way God can achieve the desire of man is by seducing, not creating it, using powerful suggestions to lead man in the directions God wants.
In Breishit Rabbah, it lists four desires mentioned in Torah:
- a woman's desire for her husband
- evil's desire for Cain
- rain's desire for the earth
- God's desire for Israel.
What is a woman's desire? That her husband desire her in return, which puts her in a more dependent position. And similarly in the other four cases as well, a hall of mirros of desire. But that leads to God being in a dependent position, as well.
When God desires, He can allure, seduce, but must wait for that to work.
According to the Mai HaShiloach, the first generation was not 'in our image;' that is only fulfilled in later generations. Only a person coming from a man, a woman, and the Shechinah (female aspect of God) can be 'in God's image.' So Adam is not. And so much was God's desire to have people in His image, that He created only one pair of people, to minimize the first generation that did not fill his wish. Just being born is not the fulfillment, either. It comes later, with compassion. What compassion? In each generation, children rebel, and parents react. And in their reactions, they discover resources of compassion, for this rebellious child of theirs, not just anger. And the parent then asks God for mercy on behalf of the child. This break, this unexpected loving response, this makes the change. This leads to a different way of being (not a cycle of anger), and then God has mercy on his children, allows God to discover that in Himself.
[Her gloss] So God made a human that would insprie Got to inspire himself, to help find his own compassion. Humans living together, in families, dicover the most powerful imaginable images of God. Human discovery of mercy brings God's mercy. and the best of our own experience brings God, God waits for their desire, formed from their experience, their language.
There are so many interesting threads in this, possibilities that could go this way or that. Of course, that might be because I, too, am a woman, and open to new ideas; right after the talk ended, I heard a guy behind me saying flat out that he didn't buy it. Which is sort of the point, I suppose.
First, the word 'desire' is first used with Chavah, as part of her punishment, that women will desire their husbands, which makes an inherently unbalanced situation. Rashi says that part of desire is the inability to speak about some of the want, bringing in a further unbalancing element.
God can do anything by fiat, and does so at the beginning of Creation. However, this breaks down just before making man: the verse says "let us make man in our image", and she takes this to mean the plural, not the royal we, as it were. God is suspending His sovereignty and consulting others (whether angels, or the other animals, there are different opinions). After some time for allowing His want to be, He fulfills His wish. God is the master of desire, knowing the most about it.
Man was created "b'tzelem elokim," "in God's image." But how can we really be like God? In what sense are we like God? And how is Adam like us? At first, Adam is obviously unlike us, made from earth with spirit breathed into him. He first starts to sound similar after eating the fruit, when he starts making excuses.
Man was first created outside Eden, then moved inside (see Breishit 2:15). Rashi says on the verb there, vayikakh, that God took him with kind words and induced him to enter. In other words, how do you move a human? With words, with beautiful words, inducing action.
The root word l'fatot (take, in a sexual way) has the same root as peti, implying the imbalance of knowledge in a seduction. Which is a surprising word for Rashi to use.
And why would Adam need to be induced, seduced, into Eden? Why would he resist? Perhaps a premonition that he'll come out poorer than he went in? [There wasn't another answer suggested; it felt like there should be one.] In any case, God starts humans with an act of seduction.
(There are other places in Torah where seduction happens. Specifically, His convincing of Moshe for seven days at the burning bush, and when Sarai persuades Hagar to accept Avram.)
So Adam and Chavah are in Eden, naked and unashamed. What should follow is the story of how God clothes them. Instead, there is the story of the snake, desirous of Chavah after seeing Adam and Chavah sporting with each other.
The desire is already there, in Eden. God says man should have a helpmeet, but after this statement of intent, doesn't do it. Rather, He brings Adam to name all the animals. Adam names them, and the act of naming is an act of wisdom, to know what to name each one, to see it clearly. And Adam figures out that all the others come in pairs, that he should have a helpmeet, too. And he is lonely, desiring a mate. Then, once Adam has desired, then the mate can be made. God makes a situation to elicit Adam's awarness of singleness, then acts to alleviate it. Chavah comes out of Adam's unconsciousness, while he lies in a deep sleep, and God brings her to him, to name her as he named all the other animals. And now, now he recites poetry, describing her, and what she _will_ be called ('woman' being derived from 'man' (also in the Hebrew), mirroring her creation), but not giving her a name now. Finally he has found someone his, giving him a sense of relief. The poetry includes "bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh," and the Sforno points out that this refers to this time only, and never again. All other unions will be of a person finding someone who is other, and cleaving unto them, becoming one that way, not this sense of incest. (What is the cleaving to one another, after leaving the parents' house? Rashi sees it as a physical thing, the creation of a child together. Sforno sees it more metaphorically, how people marry someone compatible to them.)
The first generation was different. They have no father and no mother. They have no inner conflicts from family, how they were raised, and so on. They are not "of woman born." Chavah might even be seen as "of man born," certainly a situation that won't be repeated. Neither has a personal history; it is all surface. The Ramban says that they act on truth and falsehood, rather than good and evil. They didn't have da'at, desire, for good and evil. What brings them to this desire?
Ha-Emek Davar points out that the root of the word translated as 'unashamed', bet-shin-shin, is not bet-shin, shame, but delayed, to be late. Only people can be late, not animals, which do not have a sense of time that allows 'lateness.' And the first people didn't know about time lag, doing things later, being late, until after eating the fruit. At first, things were done immediately, without work. What came into the world with the knowledge, the desire, is a sense of time, the barriers of human consciousness. There is a depth of self, of emotions and other considerations, complex enough to delay action, not the simple and fast, doing things immediately. Before this, Adam is just who he is on the surface, he has no other selves to be. So is this a 'fall,' or an enrichment, or both?
[Source I didn't write down implies that] Consciousness comes with the first lie, with the first time one invents onself. Another source says that consciousness is not transparent, that one learns the distinction of self with the first time the world disagrees with what one knows, and that is the loss of paradise.
In the Torah, the expulsion is written as a throwing out, but not down, not a fall, and sin is not mentioned. God drives them out, a horizontal movement, perhaps a birth?
After eating, Adam and Chava are divorced from God, driven out lest they eat from the other fruit to regain that lost closeness. Instead, they must work towards closeness. And that work, that complexity can be rewarding.
The first dialogue is only after Adam eats. God initiates conversation. Why now? Before this, Adam named, and showed his wisdom. Now, we have conversation, showing more fallibility. Adadm makes excuses, shifts blame, on God for giving him Chava, and on Chava, for giving him fruit, but in the end also acknowledges the truth, that he ate. This is much more like how real people talk, making excuses, confessing, discussing. And when two are talking, the conversation is open to interpretation. There are multiple levels of truth here; how do we weigh Adam's words? This is the first time the vav-hahifuch, the Biblical form that changes a future into a past tense, is used in conversation, in reference to one's self. [She sees this as implying] Adam is saying that he has eaten, in the future he will have eaten, the tenses are not as separate as they might be. He will always be a person who had eaten the fruit.
God seduced Adam into language, and that loss of clarity and cogence and competence when one is seduced is a gain as well as a loss. The pre-articulate self has an intensity, that there is more within than can be expressed, which is lost when one becomes verbal. There is a sense of dpth, and a talker is a diminished self, if there's nothing left of the inarticulate self, nothing that is beyond words, beyond explanation. However, Adam and Chava are backward from all other people, changing from completely compenent to less articulate. When does Adam start to become less articulate? When he meets Chava. He doesn't actually name her until after eating the fruit. Chava isn't the 'mother of all,' not of the animals and other living things that have been created. Adam has named her in a paradoxical way (unlike the naming of the animals). She is the one who has brought him into safek, doubt, which is needed for life. Chava is the source of new complexity, a fall and a birth.
After eating the fruit, God talks to Adam and to Chava, but not to the snake. Why? According to [source], the snake is a master answerer. [Her gloss] And God is not interested in that conversation, where all will be answered (where God might be bested?).
What moves Adam and Chava from their idyll to the complexity of the real world? Seduction, the imapct of and evocativeness of another person. Chava is at the heart of the story, both seduced and seducer, both simleton and crafty.
Who else seduces? God does, as shown in Hosea and Jeremiah, that God seduces Israel, and God seduces the prophets, enticing them with words despite their resistance. This seducing blurs the line between the self and the other, as the one succumbs to the vision of the other.
If the snake wants to seduce Chava, why does he go to her first, rather than Adam (to get him out of the way first)? Rashi says that it's because women's minds are more persuadable, more open to other ideas (not the usual interpretation of being silly or light-headed). According to the Pirkei D'Rabbi Eliezer, the snake says that man is hard to move from his opinion. Which one would think would be a good thing, in context, but the proof text brought is from Naval, which is not a positive thing. Which implies there is a usefulness to being open to new ideas. Not just new ideas, but new emotions. Again according to the Pirkei D'Rabbi Eliezer, the Torah was offered to the women first, because men follow the opinions of their wives (and are otherwise intransigent).
And this openness comes from trust, trust that con move someone out of a place to another place, a new way of seeing, a new idea of religiosity, a new interpretation, seduction in more than just the sexual.
All the desire in the world comes from the desire of God. In Hullin, there is a proof that God wants the prayers of the righteous, prayer being the expression of human desire, asked of God for fulfillment, for compassion, to allow this want, to allow this seduction. Man creates in words the world he wishes for.
God seduces, rather than creating directly. Is the creating God 'superseded' by the desiring God? Perhaps the only way God can achieve the desire of man is by seducing, not creating it, using powerful suggestions to lead man in the directions God wants.
In Breishit Rabbah, it lists four desires mentioned in Torah:
- a woman's desire for her husband
- evil's desire for Cain
- rain's desire for the earth
- God's desire for Israel.
What is a woman's desire? That her husband desire her in return, which puts her in a more dependent position. And similarly in the other four cases as well, a hall of mirros of desire. But that leads to God being in a dependent position, as well.
When God desires, He can allure, seduce, but must wait for that to work.
According to the Mai HaShiloach, the first generation was not 'in our image;' that is only fulfilled in later generations. Only a person coming from a man, a woman, and the Shechinah (female aspect of God) can be 'in God's image.' So Adam is not. And so much was God's desire to have people in His image, that He created only one pair of people, to minimize the first generation that did not fill his wish. Just being born is not the fulfillment, either. It comes later, with compassion. What compassion? In each generation, children rebel, and parents react. And in their reactions, they discover resources of compassion, for this rebellious child of theirs, not just anger. And the parent then asks God for mercy on behalf of the child. This break, this unexpected loving response, this makes the change. This leads to a different way of being (not a cycle of anger), and then God has mercy on his children, allows God to discover that in Himself.
[Her gloss] So God made a human that would insprie Got to inspire himself, to help find his own compassion. Humans living together, in families, dicover the most powerful imaginable images of God. Human discovery of mercy brings God's mercy. and the best of our own experience brings God, God waits for their desire, formed from their experience, their language.
There are so many interesting threads in this, possibilities that could go this way or that. Of course, that might be because I, too, am a woman, and open to new ideas; right after the talk ended, I heard a guy behind me saying flat out that he didn't buy it. Which is sort of the point, I suppose.