(addendum/postscript: My experience in presenting this, today, to an audience and continuing it into the question of what we owe (?) to the next generations in living the end of our lives without Jacob’s bitterness was met with a great deal of criticism and considerable crying. I think I knew of only one person in the room who had a single living parent … I guess it could be called the Orphan’s Minyan.)
Fifty Three years ago, today, Marsha and I married. We were young enough for someone in pain to look at us and say: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” And today is the day Jews read the end of our Patriarchal/Matriarchal saga … the closing chapters of the book of Breishis/בראשית. I have grown accustomed to read, each year, the Tzava’ah/צוואה … the Ethical Will … of my Grandfather’s Grandfather, for whom I was named. He was R. Chayim Tzvi ben Avraham who led the Jewish communities around the Czech/Hungarian Hungarian-speaking towns of Kleinverdun which had a Hungarian name, too, when the wars and treaties went the other way. My ancestors were part of the pre-Chassidic Satmar communities of scholars and I suspect Great-Great-Grandpa visits me to remind me of the need for kindness.
Still, I don’t know why I read this sweet note in late December … this note that expresses confidence that his children and grandchildren will continue leading a Torah life while imploring them to take care of his second wife … not their Mother who had died decades before he penned these words. This Second Wife was kind and cared for him and for them.
I do wonder about my idiosyncratic habits. Here, again, I fascinate: Is it for our Anniversary? Maybe. Is it thinking of the beautiful holiday that purportedly celebrates the birth of Little Baby Jesus but gives gifts to all-God's-Christian-children, helping each believe that they are special. Nice sentiment … nice holiday. May it only be God’s will that all children can feel special, on this holiday … Buddhist, Christians, Hindu’s, Jews, Moslems and little C. American Pitzalach trying to find a better country in which to live. Each year, I think: maybe it's the closing of Breishis that draws me ... with Parshas va'Yechi and Ya'akov's tormented blessings of his children. Maybe it was the movie that came out 3 months after we married? Alfie "What's it all about, Yankel" is it just for the progeny we live? ... That’s what the evolutionary Psychologists say?
Years ago, a widely educated 40’ish divorced woman came to see me. She wore flamboyant coats and would sachet into my office. She was not the only one who came at a time of life when (according to folk like Levinson and Sheehy) Nubie-Middle-Agers recognize that their dreams of how life would turn out didn’t quite come true. The thought was that either the failed dream would be reformulated or folk would stumble off into a defiant depression. (Sadness is an experience we have when our loss pushes us to share those feelings with others; depression is when, instead, those feelings move us to withdraw or rage at the World in solitude.) She felt her life was meaningless and, she said, “like a Poem, I need to know what it means to appreciate it.” I wondered if she had read Archibald McCleish’s “Ars Poetica” where McCleish ends with something like: “A poem does not mean, a poem is.”
By the time she stopped visiting my office, she came to believe that the meaning of life was to be found only in relationships … closer to Kunitz’s admonition in “The Layers,” where he advocates that ‘we live among the layers and not the litter.’ Indeed, she came to believe that the layers of her life are the relationships that we cultivate and nurture as we paint on our allocated canvas of unknown dimensions.
Fifty three years with Marsha? Fifty chapters of Genesis? Some thirty years ago, I began asking (appearing lastly in Oedipal Paradigms in Collision: A Centennial Emendation of a Piece of Freudian Cannon (1998/2016)) what the Ethos of Genesis was (Chapter 5), asking what mussed the Divine Dander in this book, no bigger than a novella. I concluded that it was a call to relinquish narcissism ... to give up Ich-Es relationships for Ich-Du relationships … to embrace others as Subjects in Their Own Right. Genesis didn’t show us how that worked but taught us that its absence left us adrift on the River Asheron, as they say … without a paddle.
I won’t belabor details but will list some of the Paired Characters in Conflict that pepper the book and demonstrate the manner in which Preferential Treatments cause pain.
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Paired Characters in Conflict in בראשית … most the result of preferential love:
Adam and Chava ... I suppose Trump might say that Adam was the first Rat. God had planned otherwise … hoping their relationship would be based on עזר כנגדו … a helper to stand with one’s spouse or against them, depending on earned deservedness (Rashi).
Kayin and Hevel ... He whose offering to God rejected kills the brother whose sacrifice was accepted … Maybe Hevel could’ve empathized with his brother? I don’t know.
Avraham and Lot ... The troublemaker has a miserable life and the Saint goes on to greatness. Poor Lot … loses his wife … is incested by his daughters. Couldn’t God lend a hand? And even the Winner? Tries to kill both of his children blaming Sara’s envy for the first attempted murder and a “deep resonant voice he heard in the Wilderness” for the second.
Sara and Hagar ... The more powerful subjugates and expels and then tries to kill the less powerful seeking to be the preferred one.
Isaac and Yishmael ... Both are nearly killed trying to please their Father throughout their lives. Isaac says but 7 words until he’s married and messes up his relationship with the non-preferenced son.
Ya'akov and Eisav ... The Maternally Chosen whips the Unchosen ... Both succeed … The Chosen spends his life in bitterness and in paranoid fear that the Unchosen will kill him. He’s all for show and even today’s dramatic blessing/cursing for me is a cheap actor’s final and painfully dramatic scene.
Ya'akov and Lavan … He who cheats his Brother and cannot rejoice in his Brother’s blessings (sic), carries such behavior throughout life.
Leah and Rachel ... The preferred dies of preeclampsia or something ... the not preferred has worse-than-delinquent children. Their descendants remember Rachel as crying … ורחל מבכה על בניך.
Ya'akov and Ish … Who wins?
Yoseph and All-the-Others … Erich Fromm described a character who is feelinglessly pragmatic, narcissistic and sadistic. He called such folk Malignant Narcissists.
And even at the end of the Saga and just before Ya’akov’s dramatic curtain-call, he tries to set up a preferential adversarialness with his Grandkids, M'nasheh and Efrayim.
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In the end, I hear the voice of my Great-Great-Grandfather in his Ethical Will messaging to “My dear and Sweet Childen, Wife and Grandchildren who I’m confident will make Torah choices in their lives”
As I write these brief notes, R. Chayim Tzvi’s Torah that my Grandfather R. Chayim Avraham ben Pinchas carried to the New World and later bequeathed to me is stored just feet behind me … the Torah that does indeed talk of kindness and of one law for all … even the stranger and sojourner.
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We end each book of the the Torah by calling out: חזק חזק ונתחזק … Strengthen! Strengthen! Let US ALL be strengthened!
Gutte Shabbos
(For those who haven’t read Genesis, recently, here’s a very brief summary
God creates a world. Two (possibly contradictory) accounts are offered with each apparently culminating in the creation of an original couple, Adam and Eve[1]; they are housed in a lush garden. They fail to abide by God’s one proscription, a dietary one, lose their original innocence, and are punished. They initially have two children[2], with the one killing the other in a rage of envy. Other children are born and, presumably, through unavoidably incestuous mating, a race proliferates.
Mankind becomes corrupt and God decides to destroy-by-flood all but a boatful of animals, together with one righteous man, Noah, and his family. God’s wrath is quieted and humanity is given a fresh start. Some generations later, the descendants gather and attempt to erect a prideful skyscraper; God scrambles their languages, thus putting a temporary end to their hubris. This leads to a renewed distribution of men over the face of the Earth. So much for the first eleven chapters.
The scenes depicting the lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs are cast in the oases of the inhospitable badlands that are the Judaean desert and span some three hundred Biblical years. A variety of family themes appear in stories of the first Patriarch, Abraham. These themes, particularly envy, fear, and barrenness, will be repeated in the life of his son, Isaac, and, thereafter, in the life of his grandson, Jacob; these themes will resonate in overt acting out among Abraham’s great-grandchildren. Abraham is afraid of neighboring Chieftains and cannot live with his nephew, Lot, who is often in considerable trouble. Lot becomes entangled in sinning Sodom and is saved by his uncle who argues passionately with God, in a failed attempt, to save the city. During the period following the devastation, Lot is incested unwittingly by his daughters. Thereafter, Abraham claims that the erstwhile barren Sarah is his sister and, pointedly not his wife, in order to protect himself from several desert potentates. He has a child, Ishmael, with his concubine, Chagar, and, somewhat later, Isaac is born to Sarah. Sarah orders Abraham to expel Chagar and Ishmael after she sees Ishmael playing with Isaac; God concurs with Sarah and Abraham cooperates in the deed with some reluctance. In the next chapter, God tells Abraham to kill Isaac; Abraham scrupulously follows God’s directives, this time with speed, if not alacrity, and perseveres until divine intervention stills his hand.
Isaac appears to have never recovered from this ordeal[3]; he is given but several lines of script with a total of seven words until his marriage, from which time on he remains under the control of his barren wife, Rebekah. Apparently in identification with his father, Isaac lies to a local chieftain fearfully claiming that his wife is his sister. Rebekah gives birth to twin sons, Jacob and Esau; they fight and are lost in envy from the womb and through their youth. Jacob purloins Esau’s birthright and, later, Rebekah hoodwinks Isaac into arranging for her favorite son, Jacob, to receive his befuddled father’s blessings. Jacob runs away fearing for his life.
Jacob passes much of his life in paranoid-like concerns that Esau will retaliate while Esau appears, after the initial shock passes, curiously nonplusedby the matter. Jacob has two wives; each chooses a concubine in a competition for favor (from their husband); this envy is quite openly portrayed as directly related to fecundity. The favored wife, Rachel, is initially barren, like her mother-in-law and hers before her. Thirteen children are born: Leah gives birth to the first four children; Rachel’s handmaiden, Bilha, to the fifth and sixth; Zilpa, Leah’s handmaiden, produces numbers seven and eight; Leah the ninth through the eleventh child; and Rachel, at long-last, mothers the two youngest sons, including Joseph, the favorite and twelfth child.
Things are not well in this family whose troubles would cross the eyesof the most seasoned of family practitioners working in one of today’s violent inner cities. We see, for instance, the following:
• Jacob and Leah’s daughter, Dinah, falls in love with a local. His male clansmen are convinced by Dinah’s brothers to circumcise themselves so that a marriage might receive their blessings. They do so; nonetheless, her full-brothers, Shimeon and Levi, slaughter the entire village while the men are recovering from their surgeries.
• Another of Leah’s sons, Reuven, in the meantime, incests one of his father’s concubines.
• Rachel’s firstborn, Joseph, is busy gossiping and telling his dreams; he ends up in Egypt after the brothers nearly kill the brother they dub: This Master of Dreams.
• Judah, another of Leah’s children, has three sons. The eldest, Er, is killed by God for an unspecified reason related by the text to divine disfavor. The second, Onan, receives the same punishment after utilizing coitus interruptusin order not to impregnate his brother’s widow as was expected of him according to the Law of the Levirate. Judah ends up unwittingly having twins with his now twice-widowed ex-daughter-in-law.
Meanwhile back in Egypt, Joseph rises to power after extricating himself from a seduction-gone-sour; his boss’s wife had falsely accused him of instigating an erotic chase. Joseph’s political elevation, just as his previous fall, occurs due to his facility with dreams. A famine breaks out in Canaan leading Jacob to send his sons down to Egypt to purchase grain. Joseph, now second to Pharaoh, conceals his identity, toys with his brothers, torments them, and eventually puts his old father at some risk to depression for several months at the thought of losing yet another son. A rapprochement occurs followed by a family move to Egypt. Jacob and his tribe, despite their foreign ways and practices, are treated like royalty by the Pharaoh.
Jacob effusively blesses Joseph, his successful son, gathers all his clan together, sparingly blesses the lot and, once again, bestows wondrous prophecies on Joseph, his favorite. Jacob finishes his blessings and curses ... and dies. The sons escort Jacob’s body back to Canaan, as he requested. Genesiscloses with Joseph asking that the same be done with him and assuring his brothers that he harbors no ill-will towards them. So ends this brief history of the world from creation to the soon-to-come bondage in Egypt that began after Joseph’s death, perchance some 3600 years ago.)