The Lord is my Metaphor, I Shall Not Want

On The Porter as Poet

These are the duties of the Gershonite clans as to labor and porterage (l’avda u’l’masa): they shall carry the cloths of the Tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting with its covering, the covering of dolphin skin that is on top of it, and the screen for the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; the hangings of the enclosure, the screen at the entrance of the gate of the enclosure that surrounds the Tabernacle, the cords thereof, and the altar, and all their service equipment and all their accessories; and they shall perform the service. (Numbers 4:24-26)

How can I bear (esa) unaided the trouble of you, and the burden (ma’asechem), and the bickering! (Deuteronomy 1:12)

Why make of me Your target,
And a burden to myself (alay l’masa)? (Job 7:20)

The transportation of holy objects is a holy task. In contemporary terms, the Amazon truck driver delivering the materials of the Sanctuary is not a provider of “undifferentiated heavy lifting,” but rather a highly specialized worker. Transportation of the holy is not like transportation of the mundane. The former is a front-office position. Parashat Naso references the core responsibility of the Gersonites (l’masa), carrying and lifting holy objects. This same word recurs in Moses’s opening speech in Deuteronomy. Moses says that he cannot bear the weight of the people. Transporting holy objects is a delicate task. How much the more so transporting a holy (or holy-in-the-making) people?

Job takes Moses’s language even further. Instead of complaining about the burden of his flock, Job offers that he is a burden on himself. The inflection of l’masa, then, is not just lifting, but lifting that which is heavy. The Gershonites have a challenging task, one that goes well beyond the physics of moving objects from place to place. There is a burden, a gravity, to being the person who breaks down and reconstructs the holy, who ensures that holy things retain their allure and meaning time and again. Holiness is a weighty load, and part of that weight is the obligation to maintain seriousness and consciousness in the face of distraction. How easy it is to become perfunctory or cynical. The Gersonites have to do a repetitive task while maintaining a beginner’s mind. Perhaps the word “Ger” contained in their name—meaning stranger or foreigner—indicates the key to this task. We should make room for strangeness and foreignness even in the face of regularity.

The word metaphor literally means to carry across. Thus, in a literal sense, all carrying is a form of metaphor, and those who carry the holy are couriers of the holiness of metaphor, and, if you will, the metaphoricity of holiness. Metaphor itself is a difficult load, especially when the gap between the vehicle (that which represents) and the tenor (that which is represented) is vast. In the case of anything metaphysical, the gap is between the tangible and the intangible. Screens, curtains, fabrics, altar pieces, screws, dolphin skin—these are the vehicles. The tenor is the divine. Collapse the distinction between vehicle and tenor towards the vehicle and God becomes banal, an idol. Collapse the distinction towards the tenor and religion becomes abstract, intangible, unrelatable. The Gersonites, the stranger-leaders, must move in the breach, reinventing the language and the ritual at each stop to ensure a successful encounter with the other-worldly.

Some critics of religion, like Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Durkheim, argue that it is all too human. “The cloths of the Tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting with its covering, the covering of dolphin skin that is on top of it, and the screen for the entrance of the Tent of Meeting” are entirely of this world. They are the subject of social science, nothing more. So enamored of the vehicle, they deny the tenor. The same is true of certain Christian theologians for whom tangibility and carnality are a form of sin or a source of disgust or a “Pharisaic” vestige. What matters to the “spiritual but not religious” who challenge religion from the other side is the tenor. The vehicle is incidental at best, embarrassingly particular, at worst. Literalism and spiritualism are extreme, one-sided reflections of one another. The Gersonite seeks the middle way. But notably, through movement. A metaphor that stays still becomes defunct. The language needs to be renewed. No word, phrase, or creed can rest in place. Meaning making requires change. Shinuy makom, shinuy mazal—to change your luck, change your place. Use old words in new ways, use new words in old ways, but don’t assume that meanings are fixed. Poetic invention is at the root of all invention, which is why poetry means not just the skillful use of words, but creation itself.

If God creates the world with the word, going from silence to speech, the task of the custodians of the world is to re-create it by moving words around, from place to place, experimenting with new combinations, new assortments, new constellations. Nothing is intrinsically original—it’s all, so to speak, contained in God’s “let there be light” but the permutations and variations on divine language are endless and in our hands. “The LORD grants strength to God’s people” (Psalms 29:11). That strength is the recreative power of poetry, of metaphor, of movement and transference.

While anyone (or any chatbot) can spit out words, the poet must do so with care. Some poets take deliberate cognitive care, others are inspired or possessed, following an image or emotion. But poetry, regardless, is a kind of sanctification of language, a recognition that the human word points to the divine word, is an answer to and an echo of the One Who Speaks and Creates Worlds. We learn from the Gersonites that the poetic task cannot be outsourced. If you want it to happen, go, if you don’t want it to happen, send, says Julius Caesar. The Gersonites must go themselves to protect the distinction between holy site and the Mishkan as mere material, mere object of social science, mere artifact. What movements must we undertake, what new contexts must we traverse, to re-ensoul our world and keep our own language alive?

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh