Tradition is Departure
Reading the commandment to shoo away the mother bird as an allegory
I’m delighted to share my latest podcast conversation with Mark Lilla about the Humanities and a new essay of mine on Teshuva (Repentance).
If, along the road, you chance upon a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life. (Deuteronomy 22:6)
The Jewish mystical tradition understands the enigmatic commandment of shiluach haken—sending away a mother bird before taking her eggs—as an allegory. We can have eggs or mother, consequence or source, science or metaphysics, knowledge or gnosis, but not both at the same. The mother bird must go away—must hide—so that we can take what remains. The revealed world is not all that meets the eye. The commandment is thus a cognitive one: know this. And a reward is offered: a long life. Although the Hebrew וְהַאֲרַכְתָּ֖ יָמִֽים׃ holds a different connotation—not more days, but longer days. Perhaps the reward is days that are full, a different way into time, a sense of spaciousness within the confines of numbered days.
The mystical take anticipates an idea popularized by Kant, namely, that we can have knowledge of things as they appear, but not things in themselves. The mother is what he calls the noumenal, the eggs, the phenomenal. Kant thinks this is just how it is, it’s not a commandment. Certain things are off limits to us, unknowable. The romantics who followed his course did not agree, and thought that we could in fact gain access to the noumenal through intuition. We might not be able to have knowledge of it, but we can have intimations of it—through art, through religious life, through the stirrings of emotion. On the other side of the debate, thinkers like Freud and Marx took the Kantian abstraction and personified it—the thing that we can’t know (the mother) is the underlying truth of our conditioned lives: the Oedipal complex, say, or the exploitation of the working class. To live in the world we must repress this knowledge, keep it at bay, live with false, but functional consciousness. The Torah commands us: Choose life. And if you think that certain truths unhinge us, then you might conclude that doing so means choosing ignorance.
There is another way to read the Torah’s commandment allegorically, and that is, through the eyes of the philosopher of history, Hegel. We moderns live in the time of God’s absence, the time when the mother bird has flown away, and all that remains are the offspring. God exists for us, at the cultural and political level, today, embryonically, not as a single overpowering life-giver, but as an abandoned nest of possibilities, an open market of religions, new and old, to be mixed and matched. To view modernity, then, as a commandment is to see our moment of secularism as a good thing, at least in part, an opportunity for discovery that might have been impossible when we were more protected. God (the mother) surrenders control so that the eggs might one day become mothers themselves.
In Kabbalah, the archetypes of mother and daughter correspond to Binah, understanding, and Malchut, sovereignty, respectively. In getting rid of understanding, we open a path for sovereignty. Malchut literally means kingship, but connotes immanence, incarnation, lowliness. Ironically, the word suggests living in a state of materialism and physicality rather than pure contemplation, pure theory. The theoretical must be shown the door so that the case study of the particular may teach us on its own. Platonic Forms must go so that Aristotelian induction can emerge.
The story I’ve told so far is largely one of how the lesser thing (the eggs) must serve as worldly consolation for a departed greater thing (God, the mother, the esoteric). But another way to think about it is that the mother is evident in the eggs, God lives in the particular symbols and rituals and languages that we use to encounter God. The thing in itself is hinted at or even disclosed in things as they appear. If so, the commandment of shiluach haken is a kind of koan (shiluach ha-koan): dismiss the divine so as to find the divine, lose Being and find it again in beings.
I think of the allegory as a doubled-edged teaching on the power of myth—myth is something we need to see through and something we need to live within. The result of demythologization is a rationality stripped of awe; the result of a mythical belief without a willingness to challenge, question, rotate, and elevate it is something likewise imbalanced, an under-appreciated treasure. Allegorical explanation can never do away with myth, but myth on its own is not enough. We need to live in myth and find a way to excavate its psychological and ontological teachings. When we reduce myth to explanation we become dry philosophers, when we fail to translate or exposit myth we remain stick figures, stuck in a simulation.
The Torah gives us a commandment whose commentary tradition takes it as a teaching about the nature of God and the cosmos; but it is also a commandment, a law. This is the power of Torah, which can signify at multiple levels. In some sense, the Torah is the egg whose mother (the “correct” interpretation we must ask to leave) so that we can be free to make it ours.
May we blessed to find such treasure in our lives, inexhaustible traditions whose infinite teachings renew us. May we find the sense of freedom needed to have chiddushim, new insights, so that we too can become idea-parents, participating in the great mysterious transmission of a tradition predicating on leaving and entering.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh