Bless the Sea Monsters

Understanding God's Blessings in the Creation Story

“Three blessings are given in Genesis, two for creatures, the third for the seventh day: to fish and fowl for fecundity; to man for fecundity and rule over other living things; to the seventh day, for holiness. Three blessings: for the natural, for the political, for the sacred.”

Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom

God created the great sea monsters, and all the living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms, and all the winged birds of every kind. And God saw that this was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be fertile and increase, fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” (Gen. 1:21-22)

And God created humankind in the divine image, creating it in the image of God—
creating them male and female. God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.” (Gen. 1:27-28)

And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy—having ceased on it from all the work of creation that God had done. (Gen. 2:3)

Why, in the course of Creation, does God bless animals, humans, and Shabbat? Why does God not bless the sun, the moon, and the stars, the vegetation, the aboriginal waters? Yes, God sees that God’s creations are good—but not all good things get blessings. Moreover, the first beings to merit mention of blessing are sea monsters and creepy crawly things, hardly paragons of blessing, at least to us.

When we take a macro-view of the Torah, and especially of Genesis, blessings seem contested. Abraham gets a universal blessing, a version of blessing that seems positive-sum:

I will make of you a great nation,
And I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
And you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you
And curse the one who curses you;
And all the families of the earth
Shall bless themselves by you.” (Gen. 12:2-3)

But Esav, his grandson, apparently loses his blessing to Jacob. Jacob swindles his way to a blessing by pretending to be Esav: “Jacob said to his father, ‘I am Esau, your first-born; I have done as you told me. Pray sit up and eat of my game, that you may give me your innermost blessing.’” Meanwhile, Esav, upon learning of the event of Jacob’s hustle “bursts into wild and bitter sobbing, saying to his father, “Bless me too, Father!” (Gen. 27:34)

The figure of the human blessing animates much of the drama of Israel’s pre-history and history. And as Kass says, it is connected to “the political.” But blessings exist not just for humans, but also for animals and Shabbat.

The Talmud, in Brachot 7a, teaches that we should not take the blessings of ordinary people lightly, that all people have the power to bless, and that even God welcomes blessing from human beings. A blessing is such a powerful thing, in rabbinic conception, that it can break or bend the social order. In contrast to gifts and other forms of compensation that flow from superiors to inferiors, blessings have a democratic and anarchic quality, a life of their own. Nobody is above and beyond giving and receiving blessing.

This suggests two possibilities for the demonstrative meaning of a blessing—a blessing can be used to elevate that whom we demote in status (like sea monsters) or Shabbat (a day of rest relative to six days of productivity), but it can also be used to humble—things which receive blessing may be said to need blessing. Thus the blessing makes known a vulnerability—perhaps the light of creation is perfect and thus needs nothing. But humanity needs help. The animal kingdom with its violent evolutionary spontaneous order needs conservation and stewardship; Shabbat can only be a day of rest if people observe it, it can only be acknowledged as a holy day if we are willing to prioritize it. Gravity happens no matter what, but Holiness is not a self-sufficient law of nature. It needs a blessing.

The irony of stealing or swindling one’s way to a blessing is poignant in light of the fact that blessings concern both status and vulnerability. A high status that is pilfered is hardly noble, nor can it heal the low self esteem that might lead someone to seek it in the first place. Meanwhile, the recognition of one’s fundamental vulnerability is also avoided by playing status games, turning blessings into external monikers of accomplishment—not coincidentally Jacob limps when he finally gets his blessing the right way; his blessing, we might even say is his own authentic limp, his appreciation for the things that make him him and not someone else, some dopplegänger he is modeling himself on.

Leon Kass notes that as we move through the days of Creation, we move from static beings to locomotive ones. Human beings are not only mobile, but self-directed. Animals move, too, though guided by instinct rather than a sense of self or what Heidegger calls “care.” Still, humans and animals have “projects” which they can fail to accomplish. This vulnerability, this fundamtental capacity for alienation is what requires blessing. Blessing comes as a corrective, a consolation to alienation, but it’s also another way to reframe it.

Is it bad that the human being is alone, or is the aloneness the very dignity of the human being, the source of the human being’s creativity? We see so often that our faults and our gifts are intertwined. Blessing names this phenomenon—it suggests the human task as one of healing our faults not by removing them, but by elevating them, appreciating them, transforming them, harnessing them, devoting and directing them to higher things.

Humanity is blessed with pro-creation and sovereignty. The need for species survival and the need to allocate power hardly seem holy in the abstract—in fact, many tend to associate the topics of sexuality and power with the base aspects of human life. But the point of blessing is—the places of difficulty and estrangement are the very things that are the blessing and that need intentionality, awareness, and piety. Take the sea monsters in your own life and let them multiply, hallow Halloween; don’t be afraid. The Midrash, playing on Psalms, suggests that God’s friend is the Leviathan, the very figure of fear is, for God, a source of play and fun. This is the challenge of the blessing. This is why Abraham is blessed with everything; as a monotheist, he must find God in all things, even the painful and difficult.

Shabbat, in contrast to animals and humans is not locomotive. It is just a day. But locomotion is a function of time passing, which is why Heidegger says that the meaning of Being is ultimately time. So the reason we are alienated is fundamentally because we experience the passage of time as a problem, as a challenge, a challenge to our numbered days, to our identity, and also to our sense that no matter what we do we will never be done with the work. Time which feels banal, time which feels just measurable, just scarce, just like a resource to be managed, is itself open to the holy. Sexuality, sovereignty, and time all say the same thing—we cannot live forever, we cannot hit pause; even the most powerful among us are unlikely to be remembered in 100 generations, much less 10. By the time of Noah, God has already changed God’s mind. But this burden is a blessing, or at least can be.

God could have given animals long lifespans or made them eternal, but God elects that one generation comes and another goes—blessing is needed to accompany the passing of the baton between generations; blessing is also another way of saying generational change.

God didn’t create a static world, but a world intended to be dynamic, to be in excess of God’s intent. The more dynamic the world, the more brilliant it is. But also, the more dynamic, the more endangered and unstable it becomes. We can take comfort in knowing that the world’s vulnerability is its strength, and that we can play a role in sanctifying the world by sanctifying our time in it. Without the sixth and seventh days, the world would be good, but it would not be holy. It would be beautiful, but not blessed. It would be useful, but not elevated. There is more to life than being and doing good. Creation is only completed by the recognition of what is today the most enigmatic, misunderstood, and degraded realms: the holy.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh