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A Holiweek

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Winter and the Gratitude Moon

Saturday gratefuls: For this spinning, traveling planet. For ways to get from one spot to another: cars, trains, planes, bicycles, feet. For the new Woolly Calendar, produced again by Mark Odegard. Over 30 years. For cities like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Denver. And for those of us who live outside of them.

The long dark Solstice night still wraps Shadow Mountain, quiet and black. For those lovers of the summer this marks a key moment as the night begins, gradually, to give way to the day. Six months from now the Summer Solstice will celebrate the longest day, which marks the moment when the day gradually begins to give way to the night. A cycle that will last as long as mother earth does.

A cycle that can remind us, if we let it, of the way of life. That darkness comes, fecund and still. That light comes, spurring growth and movement. That we need both the darkness and the light, both are essential. When dark periods enter our life, they are usual, normal and will pass. When light periods enter our life, they are usual, normal and will pass.

Our time with Seoah ends today. She heads off to Singapore for a year, leaving Denver this evening. We’ll head out to the airport early. It’s Christmas travel weekend and the airport will be buzzing.

Her English is much better and she studies hard. She hopes that her time in Singapore will push her all the way to fluency. Mary has a Korean friend who will help Seoah hook up with the Korean community there and English language tutors.

Hanukah starts tomorrow night. The first candle. Tuesday is Christmas Eve, then Wednesday, Christmas Day. Festivals of light. Showing our human preference for the day, for the growing season. Showing our confidence in the long ago, when the Maccabees revolted, kicking the Seleucids out, entering Jerusalem, and rededicating the Second Temple after its profanation by Antiochus Epiphanes. And, when the miracle baby, Jesus, entered this world, like the Shekinah.

A holiweek. Filled with candles, presents, songs, family. The most sacred part of this holiweek is the coming together of friends and family.

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The West

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Samain and the Gratitude Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Seoah and her light presence as a guest, Murdoch again, the Grandmother Tree at CBE, the night drive up Brook Forest, then Black Mountain drives, the fox that crossed our path, the mule deer doe standing, looking toward the road, the nightlife of the wild, the ultimate wildness of the heavens

December 20, 2014 “The enormity of this change is still a little hard to grasp. We’re no longer Minnesotans, but Coloradans. We’re no longer flatlanders but mountain dwellers. We’re no longer Midwesterners. Now we are of the West, that arid, open, empty space. These changes will change us and I look forward to that. The possibility of becoming new in the West has long been part of the American psyche, now I’ll test it for myself.”

December 18, 2019 The usual mythic significance of the West, where the light ends, where souls go when they die, seems quite different from its American mythos as almost a separate country, an Other World where you could leave Europe behind, leave the East Coast behind and rejuvenate, remake yourself. (yes, Native Americans were here already. But I’m talking about the frontier, the Old West, the place where Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, and lots of versions of John Wayne lived. And, yes, the Spaniards on the west coast and as far north as what is now New Mexico. The Russians, too.)

Seems quite different. Yes. However, “the possibility of becoming new in the West.” The American mythic West is about where souls go when they die, when they die to a past that had not prospered in the East, to a life no longer well lived, to a life lived in the all too usual way, to a life of boredom.

What would we become? When would the West become home? When would this house on Black Mountain Drive become home? All those boxes. All that altitude adjustment. And, we would gradually learn, an attitude adjustment to mountain life.

We have become people of the mountains, in love with them enough to adapt our lives to thin air in spite of the difficulty it presents to us. We have become people of the tribe, of clan Beth Evergreen, part of a strange and intriguing religious experiment, a new community. That was part of what people sought in the West. A chance to build community anew, to different rules.

We have become embedded in the lives of our grandchildren, of Jon. They love the mountains, too. Our choice, to live close, but not too close, has had its challenges, but has worked out well. It’s hard for us to provide day to day support for Jon and the kids. We’re too far away and too physically challenged (of late). We are, however, a mountain refuge for them, a place away from the city where they can come to refresh. We’re also on the way to A-basin, Jon’s favorite ski area.

When we travel now, the return no longer involves a turn north, toward the Pole, but a turn West, toward the mountains and the Pacific. Our friends in the north, in Minnesota have stayed in touch. We’ve not gotten back much; it’s so good to still have solid connections.

We change altitude frequently, often dramatically during a day’s normal routine. No more mile square roads, farmland templates. No more 10,000 lakes. And, up where we live, in the montane ecosystem, no deciduous trees except for aspen. No more combines on the road, tractors, truck trailers full of grain and corn headed to the elevators. (yes, in Eastern Colorado, but we’re of the mountains.)

The pace of life in the mountains is slower. Many fewer stoplights, fewer stores, less nightlife. Service of all kinds is slower, too. Plumbers. HVAC guys. Mail folks. UPS. Fedex. Denver Post. Painters and electricians. Once we quit expecting metro area level of service, especially in terms of promptness and predictability, life got better. The mountain way.

Our life in the West has also been shaped, profoundly, by medicine and illness. Tomorrow.

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Long one. About god. or, God. or, Gods. or, nope.

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Samain and the Gratitude Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Tony’s Market. And, for all the animal lives represented there. For the wonder of our gastro-intestinal system, all the various foods it will process. A Jewish prayer of gratitude includes those openings in our body that open and close. “Blessed… who has formed man with wisdom and created within him many openings and hollow spaces. It is obvious and known before Your Seat of Honor, that if even one of them would be opened, or one of them would be sealed, it would be impossible [to survive and] to stand before You.”

On that note. While watching and watching and watching and, still watching, Resurrection: Ertugrul, (I’m on episode 250 or so), an Allah saturated drama, and while keeping my inner lens clear in the house of Judah, I’ve begun to think again about God.

Nope. Still gone from my belief system in any form, yet with both Judaism and Islam prominent in my life right now, I’m wondering what I saw in the idea to begin with.

The notion of divine beings, either one or many, monotheism or polytheism, has occurred over and over again, in culture after culture. The early Mongols and Turks, for example, followed Tengrism: “Tengrists view their existence as sustained by the eternal blue sky (Tengri), the fertile mother-earth spirit (Eje) and a ruler regarded as the holy spirit of the sky. Heaven, earth, spirits of nature and ancestors provide for every need and protect all humans. By living an upright, respectful life, a human will keep his world in balance and perfect his personal Wind Horse, or spirit.” Wiki

My introduction to this human need for something beyond us came in the form of United Methodism, a branch of the Protestant reform movement over against Roman Catholicism. The Christians, of course, got their monotheism from the Jews and both were subjected to the firmest flattery, imitation, when Mohamed discovered Allah and the Q’uran.

Since I was in 1950’s America, in small town 1950’s America, in Midwestern 1950’s small town America, and since I was below the age of reason, I fell in with Yahweh, or El, or Elohim, or Hashem, or Adonai. And, because this was the Christian version, his son. Confusingly, too, like the Tengrists, there was a holy spirit: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Holy Ghost. Wow.

As I recall, God was sort of the back up band for Jesus in Methodist belief. Sure, he (and He was a he) was the metaphysical underwriter for all things Christian, but belief focused on his boy, his frontman, Jesus. When I prayed, though, my prayers went to an amorphous, cloud of unknowing sort of God, perhaps one more like Brahma than anything else. Distant, important, yet soothing. That there would be such a, what?, being, process, wonder, that would listen to me was, well, wow.

But the question I’m wrestling with here is what need to that fulfill for me? Why go once a week, often as many as three times a week, to a funny looking building, and learn songs, texts, folktales (like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, for example)? What was I getting out of it? My parents? That guy in the robe up front?

No question faith was precious to many, many people I knew. If, however, as I now believe, there is no metaphysical underwriter, no need for a frontman, what purpose does believing there is one have? I’m no neo-atheist wondering about everybody’s imaginary friend and how they could be so duped, that’s arrogant and naive at the same time. It’s obvious that faith fulfills an important psychic role for many, though that faith gets directed toward Odin, or Hecate, or Yahweh, or the sky-father and the earth-mother, toward the Great Spirit, or the plethora of Hindu avatars.

The notion of faith, of giving up psychic freedom to an external influence, one to be either propitiated or submitted to, or both, and the attendant notion of following a path of sorts, an ancientrail if you will, laid out by stories from an oral tradition, or immediately ossified in so-call sacred scriptures, is so common as to almost be a universal in human life. I say almost only because I’m not familiar with all cultures. My suspicion is that it is at least a possibility in all cultures and lives.

In one sense faith means that, somehow, the psychic resources you can muster on your own are inadequate. But, inadequate for what? For developing a Self? For being sure of the world? For understanding how to treat other humans? Or, the natural world? For a sense of safety and security? For personal validation?

Whatever the reasons, and they are pluriform, the answers get called into question by global reality. Is it Brahma or Yahweh? Allah or the Tao? Is it sky-father or Thor? Each of these entities claim total subjection of the believer. It may feel less heavy than that most of the time, but when metaphysical push comes to shove, often around death and the afterlife, the Hindu couldn’t imagine relying on Yahweh. Or, a Muslim relying on the Tengrist’s Sky-Father.

But, when you have a totalizing claim, whether monotheist or polytheist, it cannot be breached by another totalizing claim. Otherwise, how could it have the meaning ascribed? And, since there are many totalizing claims, somebody’s wrong. Without question. Let’s call this the bedrock algorithm for questioning religion. If your faith claims are true, then mine aren’t.

Reconstructionist Judaism has hit on a clever response to this algorithm. We’re going to back off the universal claims, but own the unique culture the Jewish answers created. There’s a strong and tribal tradition that dates back thousands of years. It’s one way of living within this human existence, but very far from the only way.

Reconstructionist’s, for example, eschew the notion of the Chosen People, for exactly the reasons I’m proposing here. Many, probably most, set to the side the metaphysical claims, but listen carefully to ritual, to “sacred” text and its multiple interpretations, to the history of the Jewish people, to the current lived reality.

This is a different solution than the U.U.’s. The U.U.’s have the same algorithmic questions, but toward all faiths. U.U.’s have a curriculum which gives away their fundamental stance: Creating your own theology.

Which is, of course, different from the atheist or agnostic, the pagan or the simply don’t care at all. But, and I’ll stop here for today, if faith is such an important component of human life, what happens when it gets watered down or dismissed entirely. What if you can’t create your own theology?

Art and Culture, Friends, Judaism, Mussar, Painting, Third Phase

Monet

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

Kate and I went to see the Monet exhibit at the Denver Museum of Art. First outing for Kate in quite a while. Lesley, a fellow mussarite, architect and art historian, led the tour as a DMA docent.

Christoph Heinrich, director of the DMA, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Monet and used his scholarly contacts as well as his museum world contacts to organize this show with a fellow Monet scholar from Potsdam, Germany. It has 120 paintings by Monet that show the development of his unique, impressionist style over a period of years.

Leslie had a knowledgeable presentation, for which she had many notecards. The exhibit draws big crowds and the museum supplied ear pieces and a receiver. Leslie stood back and spoke to us through her headset while we looked at the paintings. Could have used this technology in several exhibits at the MIA.

The DMA has a different docent style than the MIA. The docent explains, gives facts and interpretations. The way it used to be everywhere, I believe. The MIA requires the docent to engage tour participants with questions about each work, questions that help them draw their own conclusions, that force them to look and learn for themselves. There’s a place for both styles, imo.

There were some beautiful pieces, some ordinary works that showed Monet working out what he wanted to paint, many showing early experimentation with putting colors next to each other and letting the eye merge them into the color Monet saw as he painted. There were no real show stoppers in the exhibit however. I imagine the cost of getting several haystacks, several Rouen cathedrals (there were none), and the large water-lilly works like hang at the Chicago Art Institute was too much.

While a docent at the MIA, I became friends with the registrar, a position little know outside the museum world. The registrar crew handles the art works, moving them, hanging them, indexing them with the museums cataloging protocols. From him I learned about the intricacies of putting an exhibit together.

Most museums require that works over a certain value, I believe it was two-hundred and fifty thousand at the MIA, are never out of sight of one of their employees. An employee travels on the plane with them, observing them be loaded and removed.

I remember he told me (can’t recall his name) a story about a painting being flown to Australia for an exhibition there. He agreed to go with the painting, but due to his workload, he flew there with it, watched it get unloaded and shipped to the museum, then turned around and got back on a plane to Minneapolis. A long, long time in the air.

Given Monet’s prices at auction I would guess most, if not all, of his many paintings exceed the value limit of the MIA. That would be a lot of insurance, shipping, and travel costs.

Found myself fascinated with his brushwork, color choices. I’ve not spent much in museums or galleries since I started painting. Made me want to start going again to inform my own work.

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Midrash Aggadah

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

Made it into Evergreen going slow. Some timid Coloradans ahead. Black Mountain Drive/Brook Forest was icy, but Jeffco public works had put down a lot of sand, enough to make it safe to drive normal speeds.

To the Dandelion. A nice little breakfast place, quiet. Not as tasty as the Wildflower, which is in the touristy part of Evergreen, but the Wildflower is small and the dining area noisy. The Dandelion makes the usual suspects when it comes to breakfast and does them well, but with little imagination.

We discussed Chayei Sarah and how to approach it. I gave Alan a commentary by Zornberg’s mentor (whose name I can’t recall and Alan has her book). Forgot that commentaries are really behind the scenes props for clergy. They’re not secret, but few lay folk ever look at them. They usually require some background knowledge and they get technical pretty fast. Alan, who is a bright guy, admitted that he swam upstream while reading it.

We agreed to go with Zornberg’s approach first (see the post The Abyss Stares Back) and if we run out of conversation, Alan will hop in with what he’s learned. Gonna do a bit on exegesis and hermeneutics from the Christian perspective to introduce the Talmudic approach, midrash aggadah*. Midrash aggadah have a playful quality, making leaps, filling in gaps in the Torah narrative, and displaying a rigorous internal logic while suggesting many different ways of looking at a text.

Here’s a summary of a famous example, Abraham Smashing the Idols:

Abram tried to convince his father, Terach, of the folly of idol worship. One day, when Abram was left alone to mind the store, he took a hammer and smashed all of the idols except the largest one. He placed the hammer in the hand of the largest idol. When his father returned and asked what happened, Abram said, “The idols got into a fight, and the big one smashed all the other ones.” His father said, “Don’t be ridiculous. These idols have no life or power. They can’t do anything.” Abram replied, “Then why do you worship them?” Judaism 101

* Midrash falls into two categories.When the subject is law and religious practice ( ), it is called midrash halacha. Midrash aggadah, on the other hand, interprets biblical narrative, exploring questions of ethics or theology, or creating homilies and parables based on the text. (Aggadah means”telling”; any midrash which is not halakhic falls into this category.)

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Mundane

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

Stayed out late Tuesday, for us past 8 pm. Makes the next day slow. Tried to get into the resistance work, couldn’t. Muscles complained. Did thirty minutes on the treadmill.

In to see my ophthalmologist. (spelling gets me every time) Glaucoma check. Every six months for over 20 years. Now every 4 months. The usual. Eye charts. A small glass instrument pressed against the pupil to check pressures, 16 and 14. Scan of the retinal nerve. Mine’s still abnormal. Has been for as long as they’ve been following me.

Stopped by Tony’s market. Picked up a few things. Cooked supper. The end of the day.

Big day. I’m meeting Alan to go over our bagel table plan for Saturday morning. The Dandelion again in Evergreen. Slippery roads this am, freezing drizzle. Driving freezing drizzle down the mountains can be challenging. The Blizzaks went on Ruby last Friday and she has all wheel drive.

At 12:45 we’re meeting Steve and Jamie at the Staples parking lot. We’re going to a CBE tour of the Monet show at the Denver Art Museum, a four hundred object exhibit arranged by a curator at the Denver Art Museum. This is its only stop. Looking forward to it.

This evening we have MVP, the mussar vaad practice group. Had to be moved from Tuesday due to the shiva at Steve and Jamie’s.

That’s a lot of moving parts for us in one day. Good ones, yes, but still a lot.

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Our First Shiva Minyan

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

Seven p.m. last night. Already well dark. We drove to the Staples parking lot, about 10 minutes away, and picked up Marilyn Saltzman. She got in, put Jamie and Steve’s address in her phone so she could navigate, and we drove toward Bailey on 285, turning on Richmond Hill Road, up toward Lion’s Head.

Driving in the mountains at night has a claustrophic feel, the dark closes around you, the headlights illuminate some of the road, but the curves and the dropoffs make the light useful only right in front of you. A sense of isolation creeps up, too. Without those headlights? A bit like driving in a whiteout. A blackout.

Coming home on familiar roads at night. That’s ok. We do it a lot from Evergreen and Denver and we know the roads. Jamie and Steve’s house though is hard to find in the daylight.

Marilyn navigated well. We arrived to what we thought would be a packed house, but nope. Their long driveway, asphalt, had only a few cars, all parked close to the house.

Jamie and Steve met us at the door. Steve’s brother, Arthur, died a month or so ago. Steve was unshaven, as is Orthodox custom, and he wore a Bronx sweatshirt in honor of Arthur. The shiva minyan* marks the end of mourning when mourners begin to reenter the world. A minyan, as you may know, is at least ten Jews, men only in former days, who together can say communal prayers.

Neither Kate nor I had ever been to a shiva. I expected it to be somber, but when Steve and Jamie showed us into their spacious kitchen, people were chatting in small groups, laughing, talking with friends. A fruitbowl, platters of brownies, nuts, small cupcakes, a raw vegetable plate with dip sat on the island. Marilyn had said usually folks bring food, but there had been no request in the announcement. Yet here was the food anyhow.

This is a big, big house. It has a formal dining room between the kitchen and the living room. We’ve been there for fourth of July parties and their deck, which extends from beyond the kitchen to the end of the living room outside, stretches easily fifty feet and overlooks Pikes Peak in the distance, behind a range of mountains. The living room has a two-story rock fireplace with exposed beam rafters. Big.

When we came in, Jamie asked me what Kate was doing out so late. She was partly serious. Jamie is Kate’s close friend, a quilter in the Bailey Patchworkers and a member of the Needleworkers, too. She’s taken Kate to some of her appointments, brought food, been a mensch.

Judy saw me and grabbed Leslie. We did a group hug. Judy has ovarian cancer, stage 4, and Leslie recently had a second return of her breast cancer. We knew what it meant.

“We’re waiting on the Rabbi,” somebody said. Rabbi Jamie showed up not long after. We went into the living room. Prayer books for a house of mourning, maroon paperbacks, got passed around. The minyan allows the Rabbi to lead the kaddish, or prayers for mourners. They come at the end of the evening service and he lead an abbreviated version of that service.

A lot of singing, mostly in Hebrew. Moments of private prayers. Some standing, some bowing. During the service Rabbi Jamie, in his way, spoke a bit about the tradition behind various parts of the service. His relaxed manner, his shirttail was out, and he sat on the raised stones in front of the fireplace, made the atmosphere serious, but not somber, respectful, but not formal. A difficult feat. He did it easily.

Steve and Jamie told stories about Arthur, about the kind of man he was. Steve’s niece read parts of the service. She read a poem, I don’t recall by whom. Poems in English showed up often in the service, including a favorite of mine, The Peace of Wild Things, by Wendell Berry.

We finished and went back into the kitchen, grabbed our paperplates, and, the Yiddish for it, noshed. I’ve included this short quote because it says what I felt. How I wish Methodism had had this sort of sensitivity to mourners. Our family might have turned out very differently.

“The shiva minyan–because it occurs in the home, because it is composed of friends and fellow congregants–does more than remind the mourner of membership in a larger community. It creates that community–precisely where it is most needed. By physically entering the isolation of the mourner, the shiva minyan dispels it.” Rabbi Bradley Artson, My Jewish Learning

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Why did Sarah die?

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

Met with Alan to discuss our bagel table a week from Saturday. Dandelion. A quiet breakfast place off 74 in the northern part of Evergreen. We’re both going to come up with a plan by next Tuesday then we’ll mix and match or choose one.

I’m focused on an interesting midrashic tradition raised by Avivah Zornberg in her commentary on Genesis and the Chayei parsha. Midrash aggadah are torah interpretations by generations of rabbis.They are imaginative, clever, often surprising. The tradition is similar to the notion of hermeneutics with which I am familiar, that is the art of bringing Biblical messages into a contemporary context. I mentioned this in my post on Sunday.

Midrash aggadah are dissimilar in the tools and techniques used. And, in the results.

The midrashic tradition Zornberg mentions in the beginning of her commentary on Chayei Sarah (Gen. 23:1-25:18) began with rabbis wondering about two things: 1. The akedah, or the binding of Isaac. Jewish tradition focuses on the act of binding Isaac for his sacrifice. 2. The death of Sarah which immediately follows the akedah.

Why did Sarah die, they wondered. An interpretation rose up that the akedah was the reason for Sarah’s death, though there is no mention of a connection in the text. In one midrash Isaac returns after the akedah, tells his mother what happened, and she makes shofar like noises, then dies. In another Satan appears to her in the guise of Isaac and tells her what Abraham did. And in yet another Satan comes to Sarah and says Abraham has actually sacrificed Isaac.

From these, then, Zornberg suggests that the problem of Sarah’s life began with her period of infertility, till age 99, ended by Isaac’s birth. The relationship between her and Isaac, then, becomes the central issue for Sarah. It does not resolve, Zornberg suggests, until:

Gen. 25:67 “And Isaac brought her to the tent of Sarah his mother, and he took Rebecca, and she became his wife, and he loved her. And was comforted for (the loss) of his mother.”

This is a direction that would never occur in a Christian exegetical/hermeneutical exploration of these texts. Why? Because the Christian exegete focuses on the words as they exist and critical methodologies helping to clarify their meaning. Speculation about what happened offline so to speak is not encouraged.

This is so much fun for me. I like learning another way of coming at the Bible and I find the midrash aggadah appealing as provocateurs about life and its convolutions. A lot of wisdom in them.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Judaism, Myth and Story, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Torah

Jewish and Christian Modes of Biblical Interpretation

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

Went to the bagel table yesterday morning. Torah study with Rabbi Jamie. Always fun and deep. Added bonus. I got to see how he does it. It’s been awhile and I wanted to learn from his approach before Alan and I do our bagel table on November 23rd.

I told Jamie afterward, this is so different from how I was taught. And, it is. My training came from the higher criticism movement which began in 19th century Germany. It came into being over against lower criticism which used the Bible as its source of scholarship for interpretation.

If you’re familiar with the idea of proof texting, that is, using a verse or two out of context to buttress a theological argument, then you know how lower criticism proceeds. It was, in many ways, similar to the scholarship style of the medieval scholastics. The scholastics used other written texts to “prove” their arguments, rather than looking for evidence outside others thoughts.

When Francis Bacon introduced the ideas that lead to the scientific method, he changed the world of scholarship forever. Historians had to look at documents and artifacts from the time periods they were studying rather than taking Herodotus, or Tacitus, or the Bible literally at their words. Scientists looked to nature and experimentation rather than Ptolemy or alchemy. Of course the old texts were useful still, just not in the way they had been.

Higher criticism followed in that vein. No longer was the Bible seen as the inspired word of God to be revered and understood as written. That attitude is not too different from the so-called “originalist” camp in interpretation of the Constitution.

The same methods, critical methods, used by literary scholars and scientists were brought to bear on scripture. The howls of blasphemy and apostasy started then and in some conservative theological circles have never softened.

Here are the questions of higher criticism. What did the text likely mean to the author? Here’s a heretical idea. Multiple authors for not only books of the bible but even multiple authors within books. Example: the documentary hypothesis for Genesis. JEDP. The Yahwist. The Elohist. (two names for God) The Deutronomic historian. The Priestly writers. The two stories of the creation of humans, which differ significantly, are the products of two different authors.

Redaction criticism took seriously this literary criticism, but noted that somebody had to put all of those fragments together in their current form. The redactors or editors. What does it mean that the redactors of Genesis chose to put both stories in with no commentary about why?

Tradition criticism looks for evidence of rituals, cultural understandings that show how texts evolved from oral tradition into written text. Other schools of criticism look at the manuscripts of biblical books, which one is the most ancient, the closest to the source texts, and the reception that various texts have received, both within the Bible and outside it.

All of this work comes under the heading of exegesis: “a systematic process by which a person arrives at a reasonable and coherent sense of the meaning and message of a biblical passage.” Theopedia (I like this definition, but not the site.) In my training the exegetical work preceded and informed the hermeneutical task, taking that meaning and message into the contemporary context, most commonly in a sermon.

I didn’t understand until yesterday the reason Rabbi Jamie’s Torah study is so different from my training. The Christian exegete looks for the meaning, the message of a biblical passage, then propounds it. The way Rabbi Jamie does Torah study is at one and the same time more conservative and more radical than higher criticism.

It is more conservative in that it relies on the Talmud, the Midrash, the history of rabbinic interpretation of both the texts themselves and what lies within the gaps. What was Abraham like before he appears in Genesis, already seventy-five years old? Why did Sarah die after Abraham took Isaac off for sacrifice? In that sense it’s reliance on the text as written is more like lower criticism. There’s a lot of proof-texting in the Talmud.

It’s more radical in that insists on multiple interpretations of the same text, allowing, to misuse Mao, a hundred meanings to bloom. This is the crux of the difference between my training and Rabbi Jamie’s method. As the definition of exegesis implies, biblical interpreters used higher critical methods to discover the text’s meaning and therefore its message for today. The meaning. Of course there were different conclusions using the same data, just as in the Midrash, but there lurked in the background always that there was one true meaning if only it could be found.

In the Jewish tradition Rabbi Jamie follows there is no one meaning. In fact several meanings can be uncovered through the imaginative application of many unusual tools. Like gematria. The numerology of Hebrew letters. Like imagining God asking Moses to inform Aaron of his imminent death. When you add in kabbalistic interpretations, the Torah becomes a polyvalent text. Not one you can do anything you want with, but not one you can say anything definitive about either.

Right now I’m appreciating the Jewish tradition of biblical interpretation. It’s more open-ended, more down to earth often, more immediately applicable to daily life. I also appreciate higher criticism, an approach that has now gone well beyond biblical texts into texts of any kind. Can be used, for example, in challenging the “originalists” on the Supreme Court.

On November 23rd, when Alan and I do Chayei Sarah: Genesis 23:1-Genesis 25:18, I’m going to try to stay in the Jewish traditional lane. Will not be easy for me because I don’t have the encyclopedic knowledge of Hebrew and the Midrash that Jamie does. Zornberg’s commentary on the parsha in her book on Genesis, The Beginning of Desire, is giving me a lot of help. There are other resources. We’ll see how much time I have to use them.

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Zornberg and Denes

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Samain and the Fallow Moon

Brother Mark made a good observation. When remembering “my dead” yesterday, I did not include any dogs. He recalls, for example, “Vega’s woof.” I wrote him back and said, yes: Celt, Sorsha, Scott, Morgana, Tully, Tira, Orion, Tor. The Wolfhounds. Buck, Iris, Emma, Bridgit, Kona, Hilo. The Whippets. Vega. The coyote hound/IW mix.

My favorite version of the afterlife is that moment when all the dogs you’ve ever loved come up to greet you. If that could be so, I’d find eternity bearable.

Continuing to meditate, up to eleven minutes now toward a goal of twenty. And, read. First things.

This morning I read from The Human Argument, a collection of the writings of Agnes Denes. If you say, who? I understand. I’d never heard of her either until an article about her art in the Washington Post this week. This woman’s work is a stunner, combining science, mathematics, ecology, and art. I’m still not able to post pictures here (working on it), but you can see some of her work at the two links here. An important artist, IMO, but one I’d missed completely. Even the Walker has only one work by her and it’s a book. The MIA? Nothing.

Followed that with some more reading from Zornberg. Damn, this woman is so smart. And clever. The Beginning of Desire is a commentary on Genesis and its organized by parsha, the long readings required each week to get through the whole Torah in a year. The first parsha is named Bereshit since parshas take their name from the first word or phrase in the text. Bereshit is also the Hebrew name for the first book of the Bible, what I have known up till now as Genesis. Easily the best commentary I’ve ever read.

Here’s a quote from the introduction in which she talks about her method: “The aim of interpretation is, I suggest, not merely to domesticate, to familiarize an ancient book: it is also, and perhaps more importantly, to “make strangeness in certain respects stranger.”” She allows no definitive interpretation, rather she seeks a polyvalent conversation between reader and text, a dynamic reading that learns from the text and the life of the reader in dialectical tension.

Wondering now if staying immersed in Zornberg, in the world of ancient literature, the Greeks and Romans, too, might be the way forward for me. I certainly love it. Get excited.