In the Beginning of God's Conducting of the Heavens and of the Earth...
Musical Program for Parashat Bereishit 5785
Parashat Bereishit is Genesis 1:1 - Genesis 6:8
Click here to read on Sefaria or here to hear it chanted in Yerushalmi style.
Beats: the days of creation; the day of rest; the detailed fashioning of the first human and the habitat; the warning about the fruit of knowledge; the refashioning of the human into man and woman; the instigation by the snake; the consumption of the fruit of knowledge; the curses and the exile from Eden; the birth of the first sons; the sacrifices of the first farmer and herdsman; the first murder; the line from Adam to Noach
It is recommended that you open the playlist on YouTube in a separate window, but if you prefer to read in silence before or around musical illustrations, almost all of the songs are embedded within this text.
Note: This first attempt features far more pieces than a typical orchestral program would. While part of this might be due to the relative lack of resource limitations this project faces compared to the average performance hall, it is also the case that the “overture, concerto, symphony” format leaves little space in a program for really working between text and music. If it feels a bit sloppy, please remember that this is a first attempt.
A History of “Knowing”
Our ancestors composed myth cycles both to propose ideas about what they wanted to know, and to pass down through the generations things that they believed we should know. Not one of us will understand it all in this lifetime, but we are nonetheless invited to engage with it.
Genesis is my favorite book, and this portion is one of my favorites within it. What we don’t know, what the characters do or don’t know, is fun and fertile fodder for ethical—and broader—discussions about life in this world.
We might not “know” anything much better after this week’s listening, but perhaps we will at least discover that we don’t know everything we once believed we do.
Please join me!
Edvard Grieg – In the Hall of the Mountain King (from Peer Gynt)
Ben Palmer conducting Royal Scottish National Orchestra & Chorus
This one makes it onto all of the “spooky” compilations, but I never felt that it was scary music. Intense, yes. Composed for a dramatic situation that would surely be terrifying in real life, given. But frightening? Maybe if you’re a small Norwegian child. The mathematically precise repetition and variation progressing, working its way through the voices of different instruments in the orchestra, has always struck me as more soothing, reassuring, even as it speeds up and brings real blood-pumping “workout remix” level excitement.
The chaos doesn’t arrive until we do.
Maybe it’s a trope of some sort, though I can’t find a particular instance of it: I’m surely not the only one who hears in Grieg’s short masterpiece the soundtrack for all of prehistory, spiraling forth—whether from the first Divine utterance or the Big Bang—flashing through each successive layer of creation, up until the moment of the terrifying combo-breaker of humanity. (If the video I’m alluding to is real beyond my own brain, and you know where it is… please share!)
The repetition and tiny twists remind me of the opening passages of the Bible, in which evening and morning each yield a new day, in which the Divine speaks something into being and witnesses it as “good.” Predictable. Orderly. Enough novelty to make the prospect of yet another evening and morning somewhat intriguing, though not quite thrilling.
But then God makes a nice little human and puts the human in a nice little garden. The human isn’t a great soloist, so God cuts the baby in half, and voila! Meiosis gives us a potentially pleasing duet.
Then comes trouble. Then comes bickering.
It was inevitable, though, wasn’t it? We couldn’t be satisfied to just repeat the theme ad nauseam. What? Are we supposed to give the marimba a whack at it? Commission a saxophone? I think not. The fun has got to stop.
Written for the satirical Ibsen play Peer Gynt—a work deserving of separate analysis—the two and a half minutes of “In the Hall” have a life of their own. Where we might hear accusing angels proposing punishments for Adam1 and Eve for eating of the “forbidden fruit,” Ibsen and Grieg instead have their person of interest, caught up in a scandal of biblical proportions, violently beset by trolls, though in this performance they are voiced by humans.2
This rendition was selected primarily because I feel that it’s important to use a version with a choir, and the quality is professional despite some flaws.3 The lighting is a fun touch that you don’t see every day, but this performance is largely normal for the piece: I, for one, have never seen people not having fun performing this Grieg gem, and you can spot a few folks actively forgetting that they’re on the clock and just… doing music, fully.
So, that brings us through most of the first weekly Torah portion. Thanks, Grieg! Guess we can all go home, now.
Kidding.
We read the same stories differently when we read them fast and when we read them slow. Grieg gave us a compelling log line, but now let’s check on some details of creation and tune in for a listen to the world after Eden.
Christopher Tin – Water Prelude (from The Drop That Contained the Sea)
Sue Fink conducting Angel City Chorale
If we take the text only at face value, we might question God’s work ethic. The Divine says “let there be” this and that, and this and that are… and yet it takes a whole day? Is there an unfolding to these processes, must something actively become in order to be? Observing the slow drip of water in forming rivers and carving out canyons, one has to wonder about the violence of “separating” the upper waters from the lower waters, like Moses at the edge of the Sea of Reeds, but with much larger heaps of liquid to manage. Unfathomable variety in our oceans, puddles, and ponds, in our rain and glaciers and saunas, we can’t even thoroughly think through water in a day’s time. And yet, the Creator seems to summon and arrange it all in an instant, the rest of the “day” perhaps spent simply observing how light dances on the surface of what’s complete.
I’m a fan of Christopher Tin’s conceptual work, though I admit it feels a little indulgent compared to other performances I keep in rotation. “Water Prelude” is certainly not my favorite piece from The Drop, yet his positioning it at the beginning feels quite similar to the biblical birth and breaking of waters. Moving through variations on this single word in an ancient language, then flooding into a cacophony of multiple modern tongues, might suggest that I should have saved this item for next week, but this piece feels to me much like how water can contain so many potentialities within itself, a somewhat deceptive creation in terms of its appearance, but something that would take us unknowable amounts of time to reinvent.
And that’s a bit of a preoccupation of mine. The type to love to pick things apart to understand how they work, and even more desirous of putting things together in new and different ways for my own joy if not some perfected function, it’s difficult for me to identify with a Universal Sovereign not obsessed with the artisanal processes of making all of this.
Different cultures speak about the origins of the world in a number of story types, with physical creation being quite common. In the Bible, God only really gets the Divine Hands dirty to fashion humans, though the midrashic tradition extends Genesis into mythologies of more involved development of different beings.
It’s much easier for me to appreciate a God who sits down at a work desk, plops on some glasses, and becomes so engrossed in the details of crow’s feet and a constellation of sun-kissed freckles around the outer corner of “Aged Eve’s” left eye that time doesn’t exist. Suddenly: there was evening, and there was morning, a whole day has gone by.
Darius Milhaud – La Création du Monde
Louis Langrée conducting Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (feat. James Bunte)
A less famous “Creation of the World” piece than Haydn’s oratorio, Milhaud was a bit obsessed with incorporating jazz into the symphonic landscape. While controversial at the time of its release, I believe that the music is far more appreciative than appropriative, and it’s more so the full picture of the ballet that deserves a bit of critique around ethnic questions.
While this work is based off of “an African creation myth,” there is a documented reality that many African myth cycles were deliberately Christianized when they were written down. There are elements distinctly not from the biblical story of Creation visible in both choreography and costuming, but the closeness to a basic understanding of the story of Eden surely contributed to the ire the piece created when performed for primarily white Europeans in classical settings. The effect is that of “Africanizing” Eden in a way that doesn’t seem respectful of African peoples, African arts, or African spiritual traditions… or even of jazz.
I believe that Milhaud had positive intent, and that the music survives without problems greater than recruiting a good saxophonist for one’s orchestra. Incorporating African art (and artists) into traditionally European forms and “spaces” is at least as contentious a century later, and I hope to one day know enough to write compellingly about it.
Before seeing the ballet, which depicts a creation arc quite like the one we are discussing here (chaos before creation, creation of flora and fauna, creation of man and woman, man and woman’s… uh… fully realized cognizance of one another), I was taken by the lusciousness of the jazz elements combined with the power of larger orchestration. For me, it invokes the feeling of God as a craftsperson, truly enjoying the acts of creation, relishing both the habit of theme and the precious moments of variation.
I’m sorry for what I said about the saxophone.
While it’s of course a rich playing field for the more creative folks among us to wonder about “God’s thoughts,” or process, or emotions, or whatever other anthropomorphic quality would piss off the Rambam, the experience of the first humans is also quite, if not almost entirely, foreign to us. Traditional legends toy around with how much our ancestors understood about the world, further complicating a knowledge landscape that struggles to account for whatever sort of grievous errors of communication, or errors of thought, turned the tree of inedible fruit into an untouchable tree into a perfectly fine tree to harvest and eat of.
And then there’s the whole “knowing” = “sex” bit.
Who “knew” what, when, where, and how? Even the earliest commentaries can only dream up responses. And sometimes… the commentary gets a musical setting.
Arvo Pärt – Adam’s Lament
Timofei Goldberg conducting Minin’s Choir & Opensound Orchestra
Silouan the Athonite, an Eastern Orthodox saint who brought us such quotable bangers as, “Keep your mind in hell and do not despair,”4 imagined Adam’s grief surrounding the exile from Eden—interpreted as an exile from the Divine’s love—to be “stretched as wide as the sea.” Adam weeps not merely for himself, but for his descendants, for don’t we all have a share in the fate of his folly?
The contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt uses text from Silouan’s “Adam’s Lament” to craft a haunting, distressing, Dies Irae-adjacent work for choir and strings.
Minimalistic, barren of sound other than the human voice, the closely related moaning of stretched guts, and a death march of pizzicato, the sustained silences are powerfully placed. Regardless of what Adam knew, Pärt makes a convincing argument that he must have felt damnation echoing through every generation, all the souls within him carrying the grief of sin at least as well as this choir carry their notes.
But this is clearly the sort of argument a Russian monk would make on Adam’s behalf. We don’t need to agree with it. I’m not sure that I do. If the hardware is at all like what we’re working with these days, Adam’s mind likely had the same “auto shut-off” that prevents us from wading too deeply into our own moral injury. To fully understand his sin this way would surely have such gravity that his heart would fall out and bury itself in the earth.
What feels more likely to me is a position of questioning, of confusion. Most people can understand the nature of a violation, that they did what they were told not to do. But accepting our own guilt without analyzing the justice system? Why would we!
In reviewing our knowledge of ourselves, examining the givens of the moment, everything seems all the more strange.
Hildegard von Bingen – O Quam Mirabilis (est)
Ensemble Vocatrix, featuring Andrea Zomorodian (soprano)
Hildegard might spank me for this one. But in her “Oh, how wonderful it is,” I hear the voice of Eve. Not in a cheeky way, but in sincerity that seeks to praise in the midst of a really convoluted story: how do I praise the Creator whose Image I carry, when that Image has shown itself deserving of being cast out? How do I relate to the Force that created me, knowing that I have negotiated the reality of death before being named the Mother of All Life?
”For when God looked upon the human face that he had formed,” Hildegard writes, “he gazed upon his every work, reflected whole within that human form.” She believed strongly in the view of human as both pinnacle and microcosm of God’s creation: the ultimate. Theological responses abound to the question of how it is ethical to punish the creation for the faults embedded within it, Christianity itself being one attempt at a solution.
In Judaism, we often tend to seek the next question rather than an answer. If God is still deserving of praise after all of this, then perhaps the human is a project that deserves to continue: they will die, but not without first living. And what might those lives be? Could Eve dream for her children’s sake? Could she imagine all of the doctors and lawyers and plumbers and luthiers who would one day be sending her copies of the latest family portrait to frame for the endless wall displaying all of her grandchildren, All of Life? Could she hear Hildegard sitting, writing, thinking of her?
And in imagining the future, what the generations might look like and become… could the Foremost Forebears comprehend “death?” The word gets slung around in Genesis like something everyone was briefed on the specifics of off-page. Is it? Children, and I would argue even adults, have thoroughly limited conceptions of what death is. It’s still an argument in the medical world. After the fact, we can see it… usually. But the precise moment, the tipping point, remains a mystery shrouded in proxy variables.
What does it mean, how does it happen, and where does it lurk in this new world outside of Eden’s gates?
Camille Saint-Saëns – Danse Macabre
Malgorzata Kobierska conducting Kamerton Orchestra
In his famous symphonic poem, “Danse Macabre,” Saint-Saëns depicts the embodiment of Death rising up, fiddle in hand, to lead the bones of the deceased out of their graves and into a yearly dance festival that comes but once a year—Halloween’s midnight. When dawn breaks and the living begin to rise, all the skeletons must settle back into the ground.
It’s playful, a little eerie, and evocative of the sort of paranoia I imagine that might have been felt by Adam and Eve.
This rendition, which replaces the violin solo with and, in general, strongly features more mallet percussion than the original score calls for, feels especially enchanting. One can almost imagine early humans tapping on different items in the natural environment, knocking on what they thought might be Death’s door, hoping to catch a glimpse in the world’s earliest version of ding-dong-ditch.
The fact that it is played by immensely talented young people also resonates. It was their children, after all, who first showed Adam and Eve as definitively as possible what death is.
Unfortunately, external playback for this particular selection has been disabled, but I fully feel that it’s worth opening up a separate YouTube tab to listen to (and watch) these brilliant musicians.
I’m sorry for what I said about the marimba.
Spooky, cartoonish legends aside, death is understandably something quite profound for the living. Within the Jewish canon, one of the more unsettling scenes is a midrashic account of Adam and Eve being taught to bury their son: the Divine sends a family of corvids to demonstrate, likely a reflection of human observations of “crow funerals.” One bird is killed by his kin, and then earth is mounded over him. The humans follow the lead of the creatures forced to follow theirs.
Maurice Ravel – Kaddisch (from 2 Mélodies hébraïques)
Steven Isserlis (cello) and The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra
The Mourner’s Kaddish, less commonly referred to as Kaddish Yatom—the Orphan’s Kaddish—is a much later piece of liturgy than people assume, certainly late enough that we needn’t speculate about whether or not Eve said it for her son, whether or not any creatures who heard her chimed in with an “amein.” It’s one of the Jewishest sounds for many of us, and one of the most beguiling parts of Jewish worship for others: why do we mourn the dead by praising God?
That’s a question not for a shipload of dissertations, but for the quiet pondering of the heart. For me, it has meant that there is always some aspect of grief that cannot be fully shared, expressed, articulated. Mourning is a shell built around it, made of distorting mirrors that can reflect only pieces and parts, but never with full fidelity. We open our mouths to say something about a very personal loss, and the sound is sharply origamied into that of shared human experience.
Isserlis transfers a tremendous amount of grief in his playing of Ravel’s Kaddisch.5 But when we hear it, we hear our own. As alone as we might feel, this is the very sort of thing that reminds us that we are not. We all share in the unsharable, the unspeakable, the unthinkable.
If you’ve ever been to a shiva house, or if you’ve ever given me even a hair’s breadth of an opening to complain about my shiva house pet peeves, then you know that Jews don’t always mourn how we’re taught to. Visitors center themselves, rather than waiting for the family to express what and as they need to. Folks launch into all sorts of uncouth questions or offer unsolicited “reassurances” and memories that might not taste the same to those whose bread is the bread of mourners.
Believe me… I love to gab, but if I can keep my mouth shut for the entirety Mahler’s Third, I can hold my tongue until someone sitting shiva wants or needs for me to speak. If what’s best for the mourner is to sit in silence, I can respect that. I’ll still bring a quiche.
And if the mourner starts questioning, as is commonly the case, I won’t offer “answers” without knowing that they’re truly wanted, or without knowing that they’re ones I can truly give.
Tosca is such an impeccably human character. When she laments, in prayer, “in the hour of pain, why, why Lord, ah, why do you reward me like this?” she invokes that maxim that feels like a universal law when it targets us and is otherwise absent from our minds. When it rains, it pours. When a man is down, he is kicked. Injury doesn’t leave the house without a pocket full of insult. And when we’re already feeling low, it’s easy to feel that anything that does not rescue us is working to bring us lower.
Exiled from Eden, Adam and Eve lose both of their sons: one through murder, the other through another sort of exile. Disfavored among brothers, Cain becomes a murderer and then a wanderer. Even the Serpent seems to have fallen, quite literally, now legless and eating dirt all his days.
In each case, we can feel some sympathy. And in each case—some more so than others—we have literary evidence for a bit of, “well… you kind of deserve at least some of it, right?”
If only we had eaten more of the forbidden fruit! A little bit of knowing creates a great deal of trouble.
It is difficult to live with the consequences of our actions, especially when the Rube Goldberg machine of existence tosses the ball into pieces and parts we didn’t even notice before setting things in motion.
But we might be able to take a bit of comfort in the knowledge that we can’t see that far over the horizon. There might be, however far off, a better day in the distance.
Barber's Adagio has been referred to as “the saddest song ever,” and was made famous by use in public mourning events, including the funerals of political figures, and in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. But it also has inspired club remixes. Solemn, introspective, slow-building, so soft it feels like it can’t get its legs up beneath it, the song does build up to something that feels light, even hopeful.
Not unlike the Bible’s description of the rapid decline of human morality between Eden and Enoch, and down into the days of his great grandson, Noach. Noach, “who shall comfort us.” Noach, who found favor in the eyes of the Lord in the last line of this parasha.
Even with the downward trajectory of this rollercoaster of invention, we end on the smallest glimmer of hope. Except it is far more than a glimmer: it’s a sense of a commitment. While we have yet to get a verbal promise to humanity that the whole project will not be yeeted into the rubbish bin alongside the uncountable creations the Creator ultimately became dissatisfied with, we see God yield to the feebleness of His handiwork.
Though we carry, in this world, the arguably just fruits of our deeds… we also carry a cornucopia of gifts that are with us to this day. We have the tremendous gift of Shabbat: rest, peace, a sense completion we are invited to partake of, weekly, in the midst of a hurricane of never-quite-done lists, a maelstrom of projects mandatory and superfluous, great and small. Some of us would argue that the “curse” of work has elements of blessing to it. Aside from being able to sustain ourselves physically, we were made in the Image of a Creator whose major project is, at least in the story, us: the consummate fixer-upper that is humanity. And we do fix “up,” despite our downcast eyes.
Ana beKoach (traditional prayer)
performed by Odeleya Berlin
Traditions vary as to when and how and “why” we recite the Ana beKoach prayer, but I will perhaps always associate it with the start of Shabbat. And not because it’s a common start for the Kabbalat Shabbat service, but because it fits there. Throughout Jewish practice, there are many rituals, instances, and notes that reflect an understanding of the importance, the significance of laying one thing down before picking up something that might not fit in your arms, or your heart, beside it. Traditional households often see a frantic scurrying in the hours before Friday’s sunset, rushing around the home to secure objects that need to be put away for their own day of rest. Before welcoming the Shabbat, Ana beKoach gives us the opportunity to set down what’s “tangled” in our souls, our hearts, our minds. Very often I’ve found that when I open up the muktzeh drawer6 to reclaim my weekday self after nightfall on Saturday, some of my worries have somehow “unknotted” themselves while I did my best to ignore their existence. Time might not heal everything, but music is certainly a synergistic remedy.
OK. So, perhaps I used a somewhat loose definition of “classical” music to put this program together. Some of it is definitely not, but including traditional folk music in a classical program is something that classical composers, themselves, have done. I’m still feeling out how I want this to go. Maybe next week will be a little more strict on some axis. Then again, maybe not. I have criticisms of my own work, here, but part of why I’m undertaking this project is to become accustomed to sharing the process of my thinking, rather than the very sparse and fully blemished fruits thereof.
If we had workshopped our thoughts more vigorously7 in the beginning, we might have been spared any number of missteps. Hineni. Half-baked.
Haftarah: Humanity’s Heritage of Romance and Betrayal
You might have made note that throughout the preceding program, I didn’t really work with the famous fruit incident, or even do much to invoke the beguiling character of the Serpent. Even though this is definitely one of the Torah portions I spend the most time thinking through, studying, and blabbing about! It felt natural to reserve most comment on the fateful tree and shrewd-nude triad for the haftarah: modern pop and indie musicians engage deliciously, intelligently, and in all sorts of twisted ways with the story of Adam and Eve (and the Snake [and the Tree]). Regardless of what particular artists might think of the historicity of the story—plenty of traditional commentaries don’t treat it as a literal depiction of the human family’s earliest days—it seems there is something true about it.
Hozier, for example, takes up the voice of the Snake as a jealous, would-be lover. He creates a bond between the Serpent and Eve that seems almost sweet, casting her as “familiar, like [his] mirror, years ago,” which echoes both the verbal connection between the humans (Genesis 2:25 - “ערומים“ with the root “ערם" - here meaning nude) and the Serpent (Genesis 3:1 - “ערום“ with the root “ערם“ - here meaning shrewd), as well as the odd quality to the Serpent in which he seems, despite how young8 the world is, to already be at least a bit jaded.
Unfortunately, it’s an abundant truth that those who have already been through the wringer often crave to be close to innocence—either to artificially suspend it, or to destroy it. The Serpent represents a developmental stage that many never move on from: the deep and dismal valley of cynicism that makes its home between the high cliff of natural ignorance and the jagged peaks of earned wisdom.
Though in Judaism we don’t really conceive of “The Fall” and the process of redemption as most Christian traditions do, our communal story—and the personal spiritualities of many—still center an idea of “return” (teshuva), not to Eden proper, not to a world where we somehow manage to un-eat the fruit of knowledge, but to what I think of as a “Second Coming of Innocence.” To become an adult is a consequence of aging as an animal, but to become fully actualized and wise and moral in the way that Judaism wishes to paint as something Divine (or at least beyond what other animals are capable of) requires us to strive to act and speak without harm, not because we’ve yet to cut our teeth on the facts of life, but because we have finally digested at least a crumb of the knowledge we’ve gobbled down. We can see the end-game of our own snakelike behavior and choose, instead, to walk upright and be soft with the world.
Unlesssss… we’re adults having thoughtful, consensual, and adequately contained experiences with other adults. Kat Cunning suggests herself into the role of both Snake and Adam for a very sultry Eve, simultaneously implying that either is a rightful, fated partner for the woman… and that neither is necessarily “good” for the woman. If someone is going to be in a romantic relationship, I think it needs to be healthy. But I’m the last person to deny how healthy it is to play, and that play is probably the best space for our darker, stranger impulses.
And that brings us to the literate assessment of the first union: not all was well in Paradise. It’s only after the trial and sentencing of the three most galaxy-brained critters in Eden—as well as all of their future progeny—that Adam decides that the woman is more than an object, more than her relationship to him: she is the Mother of All Life, with a personal name and, presumably, rights and needs that he didn’t quite meet up to that point. There is a massive corpus of literature, both close to and far from the religious canon, exploring the quality of Adam’s relationship with Eve after leaving the Garden. I’ll assume that it got better, not that it was perfect.
But romantic readings of the first encounter between the first man and the first woman are, in my estimation, grossly optimistic retrojections. Even looking back down our family trees no more than a handful of generations, the idea of “love” gets lost, tangled, and mangled in the branches of necessity, cultural norms, power dynamics, rough pre-industrial landscapes, plain old lust, gender-based violence, you name it. The strength behind the argument that at least a fistful of biblical laws exist to reduce or prevent the still-pertinent phenomenon of “honor killings,” the preponderance of nameless and faceless mothers who provide children for the sons of Adam, and the eons-long legacy across many cultures of regarding women as primarily a natural resource all cut into the image of the Foremost Father gathering up the world’s first flower bouquet to blushingly present to his bespoke bride.
That said, I think it’s telling in the most beautiful way that we want the story of humanity to be based in a sincere, almost unknowable sort of romantic love. We have inherited a great deal of moral, ethical, intellectual, aesthetic, and narrative progress. While we still objectify others, we do not honor it as an ideal. In our mythologies of self, we are born of a fiery loving force because we want to love fiercely and wholly.
The Oh Hello’s give Adam a feminine voice and fill out the more hopeful, romantic readings of Genesis 2:23 “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” at last! Very love at first sight. Very sobbing at the wedding as the kallah approaches. Very much not my strongest understanding of the text, but the song makes me want to believe this more delightful read.
I think there’s facility in acknowledging that we are creatures prone to falling short of our own ideal, that it’s hard work to be the sort of people we would like to be even if we are born into cultures and times that proscribe a baseline of behavior that would seem to position us on a platform closer to achieving the moral natures we wish to embody. There is also facility in being able to say what Adam should have said, how he should have loved Eve, how he might have better succeeded in cherishing and protecting her. In his defense, no man had ever loved a woman before. First time’s always a bit lackluster. If we can tell our ancestors, then we can tell our children—we can tell ourselves to do better, to love better, to be better. And if we can say it, perhaps it will be.
Shavua tov!
Throughout this writing, I use “Adam” to refer to the character of Adam-2. While I typically use Adam-2 during Torah study, especially in this portion, to refer to the independent male being that was the remainder of the First Human (the hermaphroditic Adam-1), once a side was removed and built up into the woman who would become Eve, my engagements here are such that I am not really dealing with questions pertaining to Adam-1 or the separation, and so am seeking to save a couple of keystrokes.
I believe this is due to labor laws, but I could be mistaken. If you are a member of the troll community: know that as the daughter of a refugee, I welcome you in this space and feel for you as trolls are increasingly forced online due to how inhospitable the undersides of bridges have become with climate change. Please feel free to correct me on aspects of your culture that I might not understand: I don’t yet know the difference between troll and man.
Yes. The coughing. We’ll talk about this at greater length in the near future.
I know it sounds like something Rebbe Nachman or another chasidic great would have said, but apparently this is a line the saint picked up in a dialogue with Jesus.
If you listen to this arrangement by Richard Tognetti and can’t “hear” the Kaddish in it, this wonderful mezzo-soprano might help bridge the gap between what Isserlis is delivering and what we create in liturgical spaces.
Some households maintain designated areas (drawers, boxes, etc.) for items that are considered “muktzeh,” literally “set aside” because their use would violate a one of the traditional prohibitions on creative work on sabbatical days. I don’t actually deposit any parts of myself in a drawer over Shabbat, but I have fortunately developed the habit of not fretting over what I can’t fix, at least once a week.
Here, I’m not referencing only the woman and her decision about the fruit, or her silly husband’s decision about the fruit, or even only decisions made in Eden:
Genesis 4:8 contains a seemingly strange—but certainly not superfluous—statement that after Cain’s sacrifices were rejected by God and before the first homicide went down, Cain spoke to Abel. Older manuscripts are known to have added in words for Cain, along the lines of, “let’s go out to the field,” and various translations add interpretative notes that ascribe purely nefarious purposes to the chat. Across different languages, there is an array of techniques for handling and mishandling the missing conversation (One of my favorites is the inaccurate translation I have seen in a few Finnish Bibles, wherein what Cain says to his brother is “my brother.” Whether he says that in the voice Scar uses in the pertinent scene from The Lion King, or whether he says it with some other emotion—that would add another layer!).
Some scholars, like my teacher Rabbi David Silber, suggest that the point is that the conversation is missing. Did Abel listen to his brother? Hear him out? Was Cain trying to express his feelings about the affair of the sacrifices, or sibling rivalry more generally? Was he trying to get some tips on pleasing God? Was he asking if maybe Abel could slide him some sheep manure to help with his apparently unimpressive crops? Whatever it was, they didn’t manage to talk it out.
Siblings, even adult siblings, very often can’t talk their disagreements away because it’s too difficult to release their respective stories of a shared childhood, especially given that they are often entangled with narratives about perceived or actual parental rejection.
Fortunately, brothers do learn to share their feelings successfully later on in the Bible, though not unanimously, and it certainly took a great deal to get there.
The attempts of religious commentaries to interpret the “days” of the creation process into significantly longer periods of time is by no means a new phenomenon, though our slithery friend’s emotional state is less often the trigger point than facts of the world external to the story are.