Messengers of God

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Adam, or The Mystery of the Beginning

Parables and Sayings I

Cain and Abel: The First Genocide

Parables and Sayings II

The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Survivor’s Story

Parables and Sayings III

And Jacob Fought the Angel

Parables and Sayings IV

Joseph, or The Education of a Tzaddik

Parables and Sayings V

Moses: Portrait of a Leader

Parables and Sayings VI

Job: Our Contemporary

Sources

About the Author

For

Rabbénu Saul Lieberman,

my teacher,

from whom I received more

than, with these pages,

I could ever give back

E.W.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I read these Biblical tales with a wonder mixed with anguish. I imagined Isaac on the altar and I cried. I saw Joseph, prince of Egypt, and I laughed. Why dwell on them again? And why now? It falls to the storyteller to explain.

• • •

Disciple more than anything else, his aim is not to plunge into historical exegesis—which surely lies beyond his competence—but to reacquaint himself with the distant and haunting figures that molded him. He will try to reconstruct their portraits from Biblical and Midrashic texts, and eventually insert them into the present.

For Jewish history unfolds in the present. Refuting mythology, it affects our life and our role in society. Jupiter is a symbol, but Isaiah is a voice, a conscience. Mars died without ever having lived, but Moses remains a living figure. The calls he issued long ago to a people casting off its bonds reverberate to this day and we are bound by his Law. Were it not for his memory, which encompasses us all, the Jew would not be Jewish, or more precisely, he would have ceased to exist.

Judaism, more than any other tradition, manifests great attachment to its past, jealously keeping it alive. Why? Because we need to. Thanks to Abraham whose gaze is our guide, thanks to Jacob whose dream has us spellbound, our survival, prodigious on so many levels, lacks neither mystery nor significance. If we have the strength and the will to speak out, it is because every one of our forebears expresses himself through us; if the eyes of the world often seem to be upon us, it is because we evoke a time gone by and a fate that transcends time. Panim in Hebrew is used in the plural form: man has more than one face. His own and Adam’s. The Jew is haunted by the beginning more than by the end. His messianic dream is tied to the kingdom of David and he feels closer to the prophet Elijah than to his next-door neighbor.

What is a Jew? Sum, synthesis, vessel. Someone who feels every blow that ever struck his ancestors. He is crushed by their mourning and buoyed by their triumphs. For they were living men and women, not symbols. The most pure, the most just among them knew ups and downs, moments of ecstasy and confusion; we know, for they are described to us. Their holiness was defined within human terms of reference. Thus the Jew remembers them and sees them as they were at the crossroads of their own lives: troubled, exalted, marked. They are human beings: people, not gods. Their quest rejoins his own and weighs on his decisions. Jacob’s ladder rends his nights. Israel’s despair burdens his solitude. He knows that to speak of Moses is to follow him to Egypt and out of Egypt. To refuse to speak of him is to refuse to follow him.

This is true for all the ancestors and for all their adventures. If Isaac’s averted sacrifice had involved only Abraham and his son, their ordeal would have been limited to their own suffering. But it involves us. All the legends, all the stories retold by the Bible and commented on by the Midrash—and here the term Midrash is used in the largest sense: interpretation, illustration, creative imagination—involve us. That of the first killer as well as that of the first victim. We have but to reread them to realize that they are surprisingly topical. Job is our contemporary.

Somewhere a father and his son are heading toward an altar in flames; somewhere a dreamy boy knows that his father will die under the veiled gaze of God. Somewhere a teller of tales remembers, and overcome by an ancient and nameless sadness, he feels like weeping. He has seen Abraham and he has seen Isaac walk toward death; the angel, busy singing the Almighty’s praises, did not come to wrest them from the hushed black night.

Everything holds together in Jewish history—the legends as much as the facts. Composed during the centuries that followed the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Midrash mirrors both the imagined and the lived reality of Israel, and it continues to influence our lives.

In Jewish history, all events are linked. Only today, after the whirlwind of fire and blood that was the Holocaust, do we grasp the full range of implications of the murder of one man by his brother, the deeper meanings of a father’s questions and disconcerting silences. Only as we tell them now, in the light of certain experiences of life and death, do we understand them.

And so, faithful to his promise, the storyteller does nothing but tell the tale: he transmits what he received, he returns what was entrusted to him. His story does not begin with his own; it is fitted into the memory that is the living tradition of his people.

The legends he brings back are the very ones we are living today.

ADAM, OR
THE MYSTERY OF
THE BEGINNING

IN THE BEGINNING, man is alone. Alone as God is alone. As he opens his eyes he does not ask: Who am I? He asks: Who are you? In the beginning, man oriented himself solely in relation to God—and all of creation defined itself in relation to man. Before man, things were there, yet did not really exist; under his gaze, they began to be. Before man, time flowed, but it acquired its true dimension only as it penetrated man’s consciousness.

Adam: the first being to have a name, to experience joy, surprise and agony; the first man to live both his life and his death; the first creature to discover both the attraction and danger of secrets and knowledge.

To evoke Adam is to evoke the awesome mystery of the beginning, which we are forbidden to do, at least in public. Ein dorshim maase breshit bishnayim, says the Talmud. The secret of creation may be dwelled upon only when one is alone—as Adam was alone. It is a subject which transcends language and understanding. He who delves into it risks finding himself cut off from the present and remaining isolated and silenced forever.

And yet, Adam is part of us to the extent that man recognizes that he is both point of departure and fulfillment. He knows where he is heading but not whence he comes. Yet he would like to know: the past intrigues him more than death. He is obsessed more by Adam than by the Messiah. Adam frightens him, and his fear resists the most glowing of hopes.

• • •

A philosopher once taunted Rabban Gamliel: Your God is indeed a great artist, His Adam was a masterpiece; but you must admit that He had excellent ingredients at His disposal. What were they? asked the sage. The philosopher named some basic elements in nature: fire, wind, dust; and added chaos, the abyss and darkness, without which no work of art is possible.

All these elements are indeed present in Adam’s personality, the most complex and colorful in Jewish legend. Adam is impulsive like fire, fickle like the wind and as unpredictable as those romantic characters, bearers of turmoil and eternal remorse, whom only God could console and only God refuses to console.

The Bible devotes no more than a chapter and a half to his life: a few facts, a few encounters with God, the adventure with Eve, exile. His story, in Genesis, is contained in forty verses. His life spanned nine hundred thirty years— we can survey it in a matter of minutes.

As always, the Midrash tries to compensate for Biblical terseness and offers a portrait both elliptical and striking. Adam: the first living contradiction. Humble yet arrogant, saint and sinner, strong and yet terribly weak. It is for him and because of him that God manifested Himself in creation, and it is because of him and through him that death entered into it as well. One source describes him as having two faces, thus stressing his ambivalence, not to say ambiguity. Why do Scriptures offer us two different versions of Adam’s birth? Were there two “first men” at the beginning of history? Or are we to understand that even in the early days of his solitude Adam was already two—as though to warn us that while man aspires to oneness, he will never attain it.

But then we have the right to ask the question: Why such a split, such an explosion of the self, which inevitably must lead to endless conflicts and contradictions? Perhaps God intended to begin His work with a question. Perhaps He sought, through Adam, to continuously interrogate His creation. Therefore, in the beginning, there was neither the word, nor love, but the question which has come to bear God’s seal, linking man both to his origins and to his end. Thus the sum of our interrogations reflects the original question, which affected more than Adam, for it did not die with him.

Can we today identify with our first forebear? The Talmud tells us that no man resembles another, yet all men, in every age, resemble Adam: every man recognizes himself in him. Our wishes are rooted in his and so are our sorrows. Our features bear his imprint and so do our gestures. Condemned to imitate him, we are as he was, we behave according to his example. There is but one difference: we have a past, whereas he had none. No memory preceded his own. Born an adult, thrust into a prearranged universe, he was denied the possibility of escaping into childhood dreams or adolescent preoccupations. There was no way out of the present, no refuge in fantasy. The most wretched, the most destitute of mortals comes from somewhere—not Adam. The poorest of men possesses memories torn from yesterday’s world, longings, vantage points—not Adam. To correct this injustice, God gave him . . . a future, the longest in the history of mankind. And He allowed Adam to see it in its totality, to the very last generation: their judges and their kings, their sages and their thieves, their profiteers and their prophets. Thus the first man beheld the image of the last of his descendants and their eyes met. More than the Messiah, Adam is present.

• • •

The man who emerges from the various texts and commentaries is appealing and we take him to our hearts. His problems are ours, we are distressed over his fate, his tense, troubled, inexplicably threatened home. We would like to help him. His every move concerns us, we share his fears, his disappointments. Nobody received as much and nobody lost it as quickly or as brutally. Nor was he to blame in any way. He was pushed and was helpless to resist. No one asked him anything; he was made to obey a will other than his own. Everything belonged to him except his will. He had no choice but to submit. First to God, then to his spouse. Traps were laid for him and he fell into them. Poor man: punished for nothing. And he wasn’t even Jewish.

Embodying man’s eternal quest for meaning, justice and truth, Adam remains the contemporary—and the companion—of all men, of all generations. Every one of us yearns to recapture some lost paradise, every one of us bears the mark of some violated, stolen innocence. All our passions and sorrows, all our failings, Adam already knew. He had to contend with all our inhibitions, manias and complexes, with one exception: the Oedipus complex, thank heaven.

We learn all this from Talmudic literature. Adam’s life is presented there as a tragedy in three acts, with the entire universe as stage and setting. As if to underline the allegorical dimension of the main character, the Midrash inserts him into the condensed time associated with classical theater. Born at the age of forty, his tragedy lasts only one day.

Listen to the Midrash: It was in the first hour of the sixth day that God conceived the project of creating man. In the second hour He consulted the angels—who opposed the project—and the Torah—which approved. In the third hour God selected the clay for Adam’s body. In the fourth hour He gave it shape. In the fifth hour He covered it with skin. In the sixth hour He completed the body and made it stand up. In the seventh hour He breathed a soul into it. In the eighth hour Adam was ushered into paradise. In the ninth hour he heard the divine commandment forbidding him to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. In the tenth hour he transgressed. In the eleventh hour he was judged by a seventy-one-member Sanhedrin. And in the twelfth hour of the sixth day he was found guilty and expelled from paradise.

Thus ends Adam’s story, and thus begins the story of mankind. Born to affirm God’s glory, Adam became the incarnation of His first defeat.

No wonder God had His doubts about the project. He was not convinced that it was a good idea to place man at the center of His universe. He looked into the future and saw that there were among Adam’s descendants innumerable sinners thirsting for crime and blood. Yet He also foresaw that side by side with them, there would be saints and Just Men. So, for the joy of blessing the chosen, God consented to let Himself be afflicted with the wicked.

One Midrash tells us that when He made His decision, God disregarded the advice of two of His angels whose common sense led them to urge prudence. Said the Angel of Truth: What good is it to create man? Surely he will be a liar. And the Angel of Peace added: In what way does he deserve to be given life? Surely he will provoke endless wars. Yet the Angels of Justice and Mercy pronounced themselves favorably: Let man be born and he will be just and merciful. God—we are told—did away with the rebellious angels, destroying them by fire. Another, less radical, version recounts that while the angels were quarreling among themselves, God took advantage of their inattention and hastily created man.

And He created him in His image . . .

So much so that, according to Rabbi Shmuel Bar-Nah-man, centuries later while Moses was transcribing the Torah, he stopped at this passage and questioned God: Master of the Universe, aren’t You concerned that with these words You may give comfort to the miscreants and mislead the innocent and the naïve? If it is true that God created man in His image, will it not be said then that God has an image? And that therefore God is not one, but many? God reassured His servant: You, Moses, son of Amram, write—that is your task and your role. As for those who will refuse to understand or who will deliberately misinterpret My thoughts and yours, well, let that be their problem.