The End is in the Beginning
Deuteronomy and Genesis Converse About the Garden of Eden
I’m thrilled to be leading a seminar on the Book of Genesis, over a new app, called Threadable, which is like if a university seminar, medieval monasteries and Twitter had a baby. It’s free and open to everyone. You can join by clicking on this link (it runs on iOS—iPhone and iPad—sorry to non Apple product users). Each week, for 12 weeks, I’ll be commenting interactively on a section of Genesis, following the weekly Torah reading cycle. Together, we will form a new gloss, a new commentary, on an evergreen text.
God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, (gan b’eden mikedem) and placed there the human being who had been fashioned. (2:8)
The human being was driven out (vayigaresh et ha’adam); and east of the garden of Eden (mikedem l’gan eden) were stationed the cherubim and the fiery ever-turning sword, to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:24)
The ancient God (Elohei kedem) is a refuge,
A support are the arms everlasting.
He drove out the enemy before you (vayigaresh mipanecha oyev)
By His command: Destroy!(Deuteronomy 33:27)
This week, we conclude the Five Books of Moses with V’zot Ha’bracha, Moses’s farewell blessing to the people. In one particularly cryptic part of the blessing, Moses uses language that echoes in the opening of Bereishit, creating the effect of a Torah that has no before and after, that can be read forwards and backwards, a Torah that is a kind of eternal recurrence of the same, to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase. The two words used are vayigaresh and kedem, “to drive out” and “Early” (or East). Elohei Kedem gets translated as “the ancient God” but could also be translated as the God of the East. These words form an associative pair in Genesis—God sends the people out and places them in the East, just outside Eden. This is the irony—the East refers both to a refuge and to an ostracism, a place of consolation and a place of disappointment, a locus within the garden and the spot just beyond it. Ancientness, likewise, has a twofold quality: it is primitive in the sense of undeveloped but also primitive in the sense of unburdened by civilization.
The words kedem and vayigaresh appear together only twice in the Torah, suggesting a deliberate parallel between the particularist conclusion of the Torah (a blessing for Israel) and its opening (the creation of the world). Here is the theology I imagine implicit in the parallel: the Jewish people are likened to the Garden of Eden itself, and the enemies of the Jewish people are likened to humanity writ large. Between humanity and Eden are flaming swords, just as between Israel and its enemies stands a sword (God’s arms)—God’s protection. God’s arms hold up the world, just like Atlas’s in Greek mythology, but with a twist. They keep the enemies of Israel from destroying Israel, just as they keep Adam and Eve from re-entering Eden and eating from the Tree of Life. The Jewish people are to be a kind of traveling garden of Eden surrounded by flaming swords. You can look, but you can’t get too close.
I doubt the above theology which is not only anthropomorphic but also exclusivist will resonate with many of the readers, but rhetorically and contextually, it’s powerful to think that Moses is telling the people—who have disappointed him and failed in myriad ways—that they are like the garden of Eden, or can be. Also, that the fact of having enemies is a sign of having the goods—it’s a way of cheering up a people that will live under the threat and envy of enemies for centuries. “This is why they hate you.”
The flaming rotating swords of the cherubim summon up the image of planets rotating and spinning on their axes. The world is not just supported by God, but time itself is enabled by the rotating arms of angels, as if temporality were a kebab roasting in the furnace of eternity.
Another line of interpretation is that Moses is promising the people not total protection and assurance, but the consolation that comes from being heartfelt. The people can’t dwell in the East within Eden, but they can dwell in the East of Eden. The Israelites can’t win every battle, but they can experience divine accompaniment even in sorrow. Eden is gone. Eternity is beyond reach. But life is not as terrible as we thought it would be. The promise is not one of guaranteed victory, but resilience.
The word enemy, oyev, appears variously in the name of Job, iyov—Iyov is someone constantly attacked, a person who encounters God as an enemy. The point for our purposes is that an enemy needn’t refer to a specific person or group. “The enemy” is simply the force that threatens. Moses doesn’t promise a world without enmity, a world of peace, but a world in which enmity is bearable. That doesn’t sound like a promise of any return to Eden, but instead a hope for coping with the fragility of life outside Eden. The blessing in “This is the blessing” is bittersweet, a send-off for life as it is, not life as we wish it. The protection we get is not that which prevents expulsion but that which contains our despair. Suffering is meaningless until it is redeemed by compassion—so we are blessed to be recipients and grantors of compassion, not fixers who can wave a wand and make suffering go away.
Both the Promised Land and Eden are in the East, belonging to a God of the East (Elohei Kedem). But even the great land whose acquisition completes the journey begun by Abraham, is not Eden. Abraham is the descendent of Exiles, the child of time, the disciple of rotating, flaming swords.
As we complete the Torah, another year, we give thanks for the the blessing of a world that is timely, even as time entails loss. We pray for a renewal of our relationship to time—chadesh yameinu k’kedem—not erasure of time. We hope that the limits placed around the tree of life protect us and enable us to appreciate it with requisite humility. The Torah is a tree of life, guarded by time, touching the heart, and accompanying us in our exile. Etz Hayim Hi L’machazim ba. Chazak chazak v’nitchazek.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh