This week we begin the Torah again. Well, some of us do. Actually, at the synagogue where I am a member, Temple Beth Am Los Angeles - and including the Library Minyan, where I most frequently daven - we will begin with the second third of Parashat Bereshit, as we begin the second year of the triennial cycle. There are many good reasons why some Conservative Jewish communities choose the option of reading in this way. Nonetheless, as with most things in life, there are also trade-offs, things that can be lost. In this case, one of the trade-offs is a chance to experience the continuity and juxtapositions built into the biblical narrative.
A particularly interesting example of such a juxtaposition is found in this week's parashah. As noted by Biblical scholars (and in the Etz Hayim humash), there are actually two accounts of the Creation of the world and of human beings in Genesis. The first, found in Gen. 1 and 2:1-3, made up last year's triennial reading (and the last aliyah read on Simhat Torah). The second starts at the beginning of this year's reading, with 2:4, and continues into chapter 3. The first gives us the six days of Creation, the second the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge. The two also have what appear to be different accounts of the creation of human beings, particularly the creation of male and female human beings. Gen. 1:27 relates that on the sixth day, "God created the human being in His image, in the image of God He created him (oto), male and female He created them (otam) (Gen. 5:1-2 has a similar statement). Gen. 2:15-24 tells the familiar story of the creation of a single, male, human being, Adam, and God's subsequent removal of one of Adam's ribs to create a second, female human being, Eve.
Reading triennially, we might not take note of this apparent discrepancy. Certain modern biblical scholars would suggest two different narratives and sources that were redacted into our current text. The classical rabbis, however, reading the Torah as the unified word of the One and Unique God, had to find another solution. In the Talmud (Berachot 61a and Eruvin 18a-b) and the midrash to Genesis, Bereshit Rabbah (5:1; similarly Vayikra Rabbah 14:1), some rabbis take the position that the original human was actually "two faced" - that is, two persons, one male and one female, linked in a single body. What Gen. 2 describes as the taking of a rib from Adam is actually the splitting of one half of the original person from the other, thereby making two distinct beings, one male and one female. In Talmudic terms, is the "rib" taken from Adam a "face," a distinct person separated from another distinct person? Or is it a "tail," that is, a small appendage, out of which an entirely new, and later, female being was fashioned? Perhaps, counter some rabbis of the latter view (the rib was a "tail"), the verses in chap. 1 indicate only that God's original intent was to create two beings in one, but that in fact God ultimately decided to create just one (male) human being, as in Gen. 2; in Ketubot 8a it is even claimed that this is the commonly held view.
[A later, medieval approach to the textual problem in Genesis (found in Otzar Midrashim) proposes that there were in fact two creations of the "first" woman. Adam's first female partner, referred to in Gen. 1, was not Eve, but Lilith. When Lilith claimed equality with Adam (sexually and otherwise) because they had both been created at the same time, he resisted. She then "uttered the Divine Name and flew away." Refusing to return, she instead became the mother and queen of demon-kind; Eve was then created out of Adam's rib and became the mother of human-kind. In our day, Lilith has lent her name to a Jewish feminist journal.]
The significance of this debate to the rabbis of the midrash and Talmud, and thus to us as their spiritual descendants, is summed up by rabbinics scholar Judith Baskin in her book Midrashic Women:
Delineating the nature of the first human creation was important because of what was at stake. Essentially, the theoretical basis for rabbinic Judaism's conviction that men shared in the divine image in ways that women did not and that men should therefore be privileged in ways that women were not rested on the belief in the initial creation of a single man. This version of events maintained the primacy of the male and made clear that only men were created in God's likeness with the implications of potency, dominance, and generativity which followed from this analogy. Conversely, the secondary nature of women's creation from man's rib affirmed her secondary position in marriage, in reproduction, and in the public aspects of rabbinic society. (49)
This is no doubt why many modern Jewish women - and men who support women's equality - have found this interpretation of Genesis to be an important resource, as a counter-narrative to the more familiar story of the secondary Eve, the secondary nature of woman and womankind. The two-in-one creation makes women and the feminine part and parcel of the initial Creation, not a later addition to the original male.
Yet the rabbinic account of the "two-in-one" creation cannot be described as "feminist" in its original intent. Even according to those held that the original human being was a "two-in-one" creature, the Talmud goes on to say, it must certainly have been the case that when this being went somewhere, the male half took the lead.
What is more, I also have to admit that as important and appealing as I find the reading of the original two-in-one human, there is yet another scholarly source that, though it is not feminist in intent, nonetheless gives me, as a feminist, a bit of pause. In a talk given in October of 1972, the French, Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas offered an interpretation of the Talmudic dispute about the nature of the first human being ("And God Created Woman," found in Nine Talmudic Readings, 161-177). Among other things, he said:
The one for whom the rib is a face posits a perfect equality between the feminine and the masculine...The creation of man was the creation of two beings in one but of two beings equal in dignity: difference and sexual relations belong to the fundamental content of what is human. What does the one who sees only a tail in the rib mean?...he too does not think that woman came into the world through natural evolution, from a lost bone of man; he knows that she came forth from a real act of creation. But he thinks that beyond the personal relationship that establishes itself between these two beings issued from two creative acts, the particularity of the feminine is secondary. It is not woman who is secondary; it is the relationship with woman that is secondary; it is the relationship with woman as woman that does not belong to what is fundamentally human. Fundamental are the tasks that man accomplishes as a human being and that woman accomplishes as a human being. (169)
What I believe Levinas is trying to point out is that while a two-in-one creation would suggest one kind of equality between male and female, a two-step creation process can in its own, different, way be a model towards equality. Levinas' point is obscured by his tendency to use the term "man" to mean "human being " (though it was typical of the time in which he spoke) and thus his inclination to equate "human" with the masculine, from which "femininity" is secondary, a deviation. But with a bit of reframing, Levinas' question becomes a deeply significant one.
What Levinas calls "femininity" we might call "gender," by which I mean our experience and understanding (personal and cultural) of humans being divided into the categories of "male" and "female," "masculine" and "feminine." That is, we should ask ourselves if our experience of ourselves as distinctly "male" and "female," our experience of ourselves as gendered beings, can and ought to be secondary to our experience of ourselves as all human. Put another way, we should not say that "femininity" is secondary to "masculinity," as if "masculinity" were the generic and "femininity" the different and the particular, but rather both "masculinity" and "femininity," and the division between them, are secondary to "humanity."
Are we humans first, before we are men and women? Do our differences, and the challenges they create in our relationships with each other, come second? Do we start all the same, undifferentiated, and is that therefore a source of equality? Alternately, if our division into men and women is integral and original to Creation (if humans were created two-in-one), can our particularities exist from the very beginning without our being in competition with each other? Or would we women and we men be left without any common features to help us transcend our fundamental difference(s) - and if so, what sort of an equality could result from this on-going antagonism between equals?
These are fundamental questions about our nature as human beings. Neither the Torah nor the rabbis necessarily resolve them one way or the other. Indeed, perhaps by means of this intriguing juxtaposition, the Torah tells us that this very uncertainty about our nature is itself inherent in Creation and must be an on-going challenge to us. Again and again, we must ask what it means for all of us to have been created in the Divine Image, and how we can create relations between us, in all our particularities, that recognize and institutionalize our underlying equality before the One who created us all.
Shabbat shalom.