Chapters 1 & 2 of the "Torah Needed Now"
More from a new Torah for NOW.
Copyright © 2025 by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
At the Beginning of God’s Creation
“At the beginning of God’s creating of the Heavens and Earth, when all was wild and waste, Darkness hovered over the primordial waters, Rushing-Spirit of God murmuring. A still small voice over the face of the waters, Breath-of-Life whispered ——”
Now imagine that there are two Godwrestlers sitting at the edge of what became Lake Kinneret, chatting about the creation of the world. The two were both writers but of a quite different sort. One was Priestess and had been taught to play with words so as to make powerful poetic stories into magnificent patterns. The other was Farmer, who came by writing only as a by-product of mixing rain, grain, and human effort to bring food to birth.
The first story of Creation that a Godwrestler wrote and her community approved, began with Light. God appeared in the story as the Energy of Creation. In the story, God was/is a great poet or architect Who needed Light to see through the dark into creating Sky.
The story according to Priestess evolved in a pattern of six days in which each sector of the universe was created. Then the seventh day came to crown them with non-creation. Cosmic rest. A time just to breathe and do no work.
In Priestess’ story, vegetation was created a couple of epochs before humanity. But the other storyteller who was shmoozing by Kinneret had a different practice and purpose in mind and therefore a different order in his Creation story.
For him, the point of the whole story of Creation was feeding human beings. In Israelite law, the Priestess held no land and learned only to make grand liturgies. Farmer, of course, was focused on rain, grain, and some human being to turn them into food. The Farmer as transformative hero!
Like modern Creation stories, Priestess’ story began with the mysterious Big Bang turning into the star system.
The modern story comes not from two old codgers sitting by Kinneret, but from young scientists in several universities. It begins with a Big Bang that no one pretends to understand. A tiny energy center came into existence – no one knows how. It exploded and kept exploding as it shaped a universe.
It took 14 BILLION years for the Star System to emerge and give birth to numerous planets. In at least one of those planets, after millennia of evolving more and more complicated life, there emerged a species with enough wit to imagine the first Big Bang and everything that came after it.
Farmer’s story and in some ways, the modern one too, knew that Humus had given birth to humankind, Earth had given birth to these human earthlings. Several generations of researchers – searching again and again and again – grew able to delineate their own physical descent as well as their own intellectual, emotional, and spiritual ascent. This ascent made it possible for them to speak from a profound self-consciousness.
What this new full consciousness also gave them was the technological ability to destroy the planet that sustained them.
Life, love, liberty, sharing – or death. Living with both possibilities in our own hearts, brains, bodies, is the tormented truth of our own newness, our own generation.
We need new Torah to guide us as we tremble forth into our souls. This trembling suffuses the third great Creation Story.
Toward Eden: Earth (Adamah) gives birth to the Human Community (adam)
In our 21st century, when human intervention is deeply wounding the web of life on Earth and with it, the patterns of human community and prosperity, we may see a new facet of the story of Eden, the Garden of Delight.
The story begins by pointing us toward the close relationship between the human race and the Earth:
"And YHWH [the Name of God that can only be pronounced by breathing with no vowels, thus "Yahhh, Breath of Life"] formed the adam [human earthling] from the adamah [humus-earth] and blew into her/his/their nostrils the breath of life; and the human-earthling became a living being." (Genesis 2:7)
I have inserted these odd translations of adam and adamah in order to heighten in English the interrelationship that Torah – indeed, the Hebrew language itself – teaches so simply. Indeed we do have in English the word "earthling" to mean "human being" and the word "humus" to mean a kind of earth, but each of them is a highly specialized word.
What "adamah" and "adam" teach is deeply different from what the word "environment" we use so often nowadays teaches. The "environment" is in the "environs" – out there, separate from us. The very words "adam" and "adamah" are intertwined, and they should teach us not only about language but about the reality that language tries to word.
And as if the bare words might still not be enough to teach us, the Torah then explicitly says that we were deeply intertwined at the earthy birthing of the human community.
Notice that in moving from earthiness to humanness, the human lost the "ah" – a breath-sound – at the end of Adamah, and then received from God a more conscious independent breathing.
This replicates the process of each human birth – indeed, each mammal's birth – in which at first the fetus has an unconscious gift of breath from Mother through the placenta; loses this breath as she/he/they is born; and regains a separate, more conscious breath – for humans, often by a tap from an attending adult.
What we know from our own experience in every individual birth, says Torah, we should understand is true about our species' origins and our continuing relationship with Mother Earth.
And Torah proceeds to the story of Eden.
God – the Truth and Reality of life – says to the human couple who together make up the human community: "Here there is overflowing abundance. Eat of it, of every tree of the Garden, in joy! – But you must also learn self-restraint. Do not gobble up all this abundance. The fruit of one tree you must not eat."
But the Humans abandon self-restraint. They eat of the one tree they have been told to leave uneaten.
And their greed ruins the abundance. So – says God/Reality – they must work with the sweat pouring down their faces just to wring from Earth enough to eat, for it will give forth thorns and thistles.
Did God, or Reality, rejoice at this reminder that actions bear consequences? Hardly! God wails, "Ayekka, Where are you?" – which rabbinic midrash understands as the first "Eicha," the word that begins the Book of Lamentations about our exile when the Temple was destroyed. The first exile was the exile of adam, humankind, from adamah, Earth.
This ancient archetypal story is the story of today. The story of the BP oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. The story of rapacious Big Oil desecrating the graves and poisoning the water of the Sioux Nation in North Dakota, to drive a pipeline though Native land and release more fumes of CO2 to burn our Mother Earth. Our modern Corporate Carbon Pharaohs in their greed bring Plagues upon humanity and Earth, rejecting self-restraint: super-droughts in California and Australia and Syria and central Africa, unheard-of floods in Pakistan and North Carolina, superstorms in the Philippines and the Jersey shore.
Yet there are ways to redress this disaster. It happens, says the story of the Wilderness, just after the Breath of Life frees ancient Israelites from the ancient power-greedy Pharaoh. From the Plagues brought on by his stubbornness, arrogance, and cruelty. The first discovery of these runaway slaves is the Shabbat that comes with manna – a gift from the abundant earth and a taste of rest from endless toil. Shabbat comes as a new form of self-restraint – filled with joy, rather than ascetic self-denial. The curse reversed. A taste of Eden once again.
In Jewish theology, Shabbat, a foretaste of the Messianic Age, is the redemptive gift that begins the annulment of the "original sin" of Eden – the sin of abusing Mother Earth. Begins, but only begins. We still must yearn toward "yom sheh-kulo Shabbat, the day that will be wholly Shabbat" – toward "Eden for a Grown-up Human Race," depicted in the Song of Songs, when love among human beings and between Humanity and Earth, adam and adamah, is freely flourishing.
Says Isaiah (51:3): "Vayasem midbarah k'eden v'arvatah k'gan Yahh. (You turn the barren place to Eden, and the desert to a garden breathing Life.")
Who is this "You"? Can it be "We"?
Only if we sow the Garden's seeds among us now, with miniature communities of Eden – and in the same breath, breathing the Great InterBreath, act to free adam and adamah from domination by the Pharaohs of our time.
Can WE turn the barren place to Eden?
Wonderful and inspirational. Thank you. This vision is so simple but so profound. It shows how we could find real nourishment from things which we daren't touch or change, if we are a bit brave. Things change whether we do or try not to...