WHEAT IN EDEN, COMPUTERS IN OUR DAY
by Arthur Waskow
The ecological crisis is an index to changing relationships
among God, humans, and all forms of life.
ARTHUR WASKOW is a Rabbi and director of the Shalom Center, a
division of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. He is the author of Seasons
of Our Joy,Down-to-Earth Judaism, and Godwrestling-Round
2, among many other works.
When Jews of this past generation began to sense a deepening
environmental crisis in earth-human relationships, and especially when
they saw the Bible accused of causing this crisis through its command to
"fill the earth and subdue it," some of them felt impelled to
wrestle anew with Torah in the light of that crisis. Their first
responses were mostly the quotation of a passage here, a verse there, or
a major category of biblical or rabbinic thought like the tradition of
Shabbat or of "bal tashchit" ("Do not destroy"), to
show that the "subdual" passage did not mean what it sounded
like, and that biblical and rabbinic Jewish tradition did indeed care
for the earth.
Recently, however, there have been efforts to look more deeply into
the present ecological crisis as itself an index to a changing
relationship among God, humans, and other strands of the Web of Life --
in which God's place in the relationship shifts along with the places of
the other partners -- and to look more deeply into the whole gestalt of
the Bible for clues to previous such transformational crises, and how
such crises may have shaped the very foundations of Jewish peoplehood
and spirituality. We will come back to what this different way of
understanding both the texts and the history mean for religious thought
and action. But first let us draw on three recent books in which this
new way of exploring has raised similar questions, though not identical
answers, by looking at the relationships among hunter, gatherer,
pastoral, and agricultural life-paths in the Bible. I will be weaving
some ideas from these three books together with some ideas developed in
my own books, Godwrestling (1978) and Godwrestling-Round 2
(1997).
The three books are:
Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, a widely read "novel"
made up of dialogue between a human and a gorilla about the present
eco-disaster that the earth and human earthlings are facing;
The Ecology of Eden, by Evan Eisenberg, an
anthropological-historical analysis of how the onset of agriculture
affected the worldview of ancient Israel, and how the resulting tugs
between "the Tower" (Babylon, the city), and "the
Mountain" (Sinai, the wild) affected not only biblical but more
recent understandings of what is sacred in the world;
The Book of Miriam, by Leonard Angel, the newly written
text of a fictional, purportedly ancient sacred poem/ text by Moses'
sister Miriam that in Angel's imagining had been hidden away or
excluded by many generations of male Jewish scholars, while being
secretly studied by generations of women. The Miriam text takes a
view of the sacred history of the Israelites different from that put
forward by Moses. It is far more devoted to nomadic life, far more
opposed to centralized monarchy, far more naturalist in its outlook
on God and miracles.
Quinn, Eisenberg, and Angel all suggest one variant or another of the
view that the Eden story is a tale told by West-Semitic nonfarmers
(shepherds or hunter-gatherers). At one level, they suggest (there are
obviously other levels through which the stories also enrich our
spiritual lives, and the different levels are nonexclusive), Eden and
the Cain-Abel story are "about" the encroachment into
West-Semitic lives of a great agricultural empire, Babylonia. From this
perspective, Eden was a story about the alienation between human and
earth and the subordination of women that agriculture meant. Cain -- the
angry farmer -- was guilty of killing his peaceful shepherd brother.
(Cain was then tamed by being turned into a nomad -- the opposite of a
turf-conscious farmer.)
Let us look further at this model. Babylonia had become powerful
precisely because it was one of the places where highly organized
agriculture was invented. This invention was a step "forward"
in controlling the food supply and multiplying humans, and at the same
time it was a step into alienation from and coercion of the earth by
human beings. That the same act could have both meanings should be no
surprise: In the individual life-cycle, for example, we are used to the
idea that birth itself, "the terrible two's," and
"adolescence" are all steps in growing up, involving both
rejection and rebellion toward Mama/ Papa, and striking out on
one's own.
So we might say that for the human race as a whole, just as for
individuals, this process of self-definition/rebellion comes in stages.
The "birth" of the human race is told by the Bible as a tale
of earth and breath: A lump of reddish clay (Adamah) loses the final
"hei" from its name -- the sound of a breath -- and receives
the "ruach elohim," the Breath of God, to become adam
(Human/Earthling). Perhaps we can see the lost "hei" as the
unconscious breathing through the placenta that is lost in birthing, and
the ruach as the conscious, independent breath that comes
soon after.
On the species level, the human race tears itself from the womb of
earth (perhaps a relationship much more like that of the other primates)
and separates itself into a slightly -- but only slightly -- alienated
being. Hunter-gatherer humans were not so different from our primate
cousins. They -- and even shepherds -- had a playful relationship with
the earth, moving from place to place to avoid exhausting it, and thus
also avoiding exhausting themselves,
But the process of maturation/alienation did not halt there.
Agriculture was another step toward separating ourselves from the earth
so as to subdue it. And in subduing earth, we subdued ourselves and each
other. More births, more birth-pangs. Women ruled by men. Ownership, and
governments to enforce it, with armies to protect it. From the
standpoint of hunter-gatherers and shepherds, the agro-revolution was a
disastrous, dangerous, oppressive event.
So from this perspective, Eden becomes the story of a tragic mistake
built around an act of eating, the results of which are war between
earth and human-earthling; role differentiation and pain between women
and men and between the generations; and conflict between centralized
power and the stubborn local cultures. From this perspective, the
ancient midrash that the Tree of Eden was a wheat plant makes good
historical-anthropological sense. Also from this perspective, argues
Quinn, comes the Torah's story of Cain the murdering farmer, who
shatters shepherd Abel -- Cain/ Kayyin/ Possessive-one, vs. Abel/ Hevel/Evanescent
Puff of Breath.
From the perspective of the West Semites, the aggressive farmers have
encroached on-and ultimately murdered -- their pastoral society. Even
though the farmers have distanced themselves from the earth and have
violently turned to dominating other human beings, they ultimately win
God's protection and give birth to city-builders. This newly alienated
being, the farmer-human, is not an alien -- but one of the results of
the earth's own processes of evolution.
The shepherd-Semites ultimately joined the agro-revolution and became
also farmers. But they kept drawing on their own past experience as
shepherds and gatherers to build in such protections of the earth and of
their own long-term vision as the Shabbat, the Sabbatical Year, and the
Jubilee, during which humans become gatherers again one-seventh of the
time. (See the Jubilee tradition of the Hebrew Bible (Exod. 23:9-12,
Lev. 25:1-55, Lev. 26:33-35, 43-45, Deut. 15:1-18, Isa. 58:1-14,
61:1-11, Jer. 32:6-27, 33:1-44, 34:1-22, 2 Chron. 36:20-21, and my
own wrestling with it in Godwrestling [1978], 110-27, and Godwrestling-Round
2 [1996], 231-44, 301-13.)
What is crucial here may be seeing the emergent Torah as a response
to the great traumatic leap forward of the agro-revolution. A response
that tried to create new forms of community to bind into livability and
decency the radically new forms of controlling other human beings and
the earth.
Now let us turn to how the spiritual seekers and religious activists
of our own day might draw upon this way of understanding the Bible. We
can see that the process continues. We can draw on the experience of a
number of revolutions like the agro-revolution. One of these, the
victory of Hellenistic/Roman civilization, shattered biblical Judaism
and called forth a response (analogous to the response of Torah) in the
form of Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Most recently, the
industrial and techno-revolutions are calling forth movements for
renewal and transformation (not the same as simultaneous movements for
restoration of the old) of all the faith traditions on the planet, and
are also calling forth such new approaches to community as feminism and
ecology. We have learned to see more clearly both the alienating and the
maturing aspects of this continuing story. And we can ask ourselves: How
does the human race keep growing up?
That means: how do we respond to the great recent leaps in
technology, in control of the earth and each other, by creating,
renewing, and revitalizing the other aspect of growing up -- adding not
only new ability to control and make and produce, but new ability to
love, to commune, to Be? In our own generation, what could we do that
would be analogous to the West Semites' insistence on observance of the
Sabbath and Sabbatical year as ways of taming the most destructive urges
of the agro-revolution, and celebrating the spiritual value of a rhythm
in which communing with earth alternates with controlling it?
We should note that the kind of reading we have done here differs
both from the classic traditional ways of reading religious texts and
from the modernist way of reading these ancient documents. In the
traditional way, the text itself was understood to be all-sufficient as
the Word of God, and midrash (or other forms of reinterpretation) was
almost always justified on the basis of a textual indication or oddity.
From the Modernist standpoint, on the other hand, the text is seen as
only a reflection of the social-historical context. It has no
independent validity as an ethical or moral teaching, and by many
modernists is analyzed into different documents and in other ways so
totally relativized that it is radically diminished or even nullified as
ethical, moral, or religious teaching with any meaning for our
own era.
Among Jewish renewal circles in the last generation (and of course
among some Christian thinkers as well; I am less familiar with their
work), there has grown up a different model. It looks at the biblical
text (and other traditional texts, like the Talmuds) as the records of
spiritual seekers who in the context of their own societies are
struggling to hear and respond to God. As process, their struggles and
the records of them in these texts are sacred; the specific content and
the specific responses they made to what they heard as God's will may or
may not be specifically sacred, depending on the arenas in which society
has and has not changed. That means the history and sociology of the
biblical or Talmudic or other sacred literatures must be understood, in
order to decide what specific content to accept and what to transcend.
To take one major case, understanding the relationships of women and men
in the societies out of which the speaking and writing of various sacred
literatures arose will have a deep impact on spiritual seekers of today,
when their own values (and the underlying social reality) about
relationships between women and men may be so different.
This approach, which has been so strong among some feminist Jews and
Christians -- who are ready neither to relativize their tradition into
meaninglessness nor to accept it as fully God's Word -- is having an
impact on "environmentalist" readers of the traditions, as
well. Faced with a Judaism or a Christianity that has sometimes demeaned
nonhuman aspects of Creation just as it demeaned nonmale aspects of the
human race, some readers today are similarly seeking ways to understand
the ancient text as a guide through its process, more than its content,
to an affirmation of all Creation.
This approach does not counterpose the historical/political to the
spiritual, but sees each as an expression of the other. Torah becomes a
tale of the spirals of growing up in power and love of the human race,
and also of individual human beings. Indeed, for some this approach
draws both on the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria and the radical Catholic
theology of Teilhard de Chardin, seeing the historical process and its
undulating spiral of growing power interwoven with growing community as
the fits and starts through which God's Presence becomes more fully
manifest in the world.
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Spring/Summer 2000, Vol. 50 Issue 1-2
