live laugh lekh lekha
Sholem aleichem,
Once upon a time, the villagers of Chelm were trying to move a large boulder down a hill. They had dragged it about halfway down, when a passerby commented to them, "you know, it would be a lot easier to just let the boulder roll down the hill." After conferring among themselves, the Chelmers decided to give it a try. So they dragged the boulder back to the top of the hill, and pushed it off. The passerby was right! It rolled down like a charm.
At the beginning of this portion, haShem tells Avraham "lekh lekha" -- go to/for yourself. Leave your home, leave your relatives (except Lot, for some reason) and go to a brand new land. Many a commentator has used this phrase to talk about how we have to trust ourselves, or know ourselves, or listen to the voice of haShem calling us. But the question I always have is: how do we know? How do we know if the voice calling us is a voice from heaven? How do we know if the things we deeply feel are true? More to the point of this entire newsletter project: how do we know what the Torah is teaching us?
When I've talked about this with rabbis they often refer me to the story of Elijah in the cave, or Rabbi Yosei in the ruins of Jerusalem. The voice of haShem, they tell me, is the "still, small voice" that murmurs rhythmically throughout our days. There's some truth to this, or at least some value in trying to listen to the quieter voices inside us, trying to tune into the voices that only speak when we tune out some of the cacophony of the world. But small, quiet, insistent voices are not always truth. The things we feel most deeply are not always true. It is no exaggeration to say that if I believed they were, I would no longer be alive. So I have a vested interested in pursuing this question further.
When Avraham and Sarah learn they are going to have a son, they both react by laughing (Avraham in this Torah portion, Sarah in the next), and their son Yitzchak is named for this laughter. Another Yitzchak, Rav Yitzchak Meir Morgenstern, teaches that the gematria for laughter (שחוק = 414) is the same as that of the eternal light (אור אין סוף), which is the Torah (I am quite certain that I learned this via Joey Rosenfeld, but have been unable to track down a link). There are three kinds of laughter: involuntary laughter in response to deep emotions, laughter at someone/something (often to control them), and laughter from absurd reversals or paradoxes (this latter is the core of Jewish humor, such as when the Chelmers dragged the boulder back to the top of the hill). Corresponding to these are three experiences of Torah: Torah of deep emotions, Torah of (g-d forbid) control and degradation, and Torah of paradox/reversal, of "these and these." Just as Chelmishe reversal is the core of Jewish humor, I think this last type is the core of Jewish Torah. This is where we hear the voice of haShem.
I grew up Jewish, but in a homeschooling community of predominantly literalist evangelical christians (#notallchristians, to be clear). They were quite comfortable with the first two of these three types, and (as literalists) quite uncomfortable with the paradoxes of the last type. During my regrettable (though understandable) New Atheist phase in reaction to them, I admit to indulging in some of the common mockery of this kind of literalism. "You believe the Bible is literal, but look at this contradiction," I might say. Or, "You believe the Bible is literal, but are reading a translation of a translation of a translation." Neither of these is, of course, a very convincing argument. Much like the Rabbis, Christians have various methods of reconciling supposed contradictions in the text. As for translation, lo kashye, would G-d permit a mistranslation of His Divine Words?
This latter response is not unique to Christians! We have our own version of it in Judaism. We are taught in a baraisa:
There was an incident involving King Ptolemy of Egypt, who assembled seventy-two Elders from the Sages of Israel, and put them into seventy-two separate rooms, and did not reveal to them for what purpose he assembled them, so that they would not coordinate their responses. He entered and approached each and every one, and said to each of them: Write for me a translation of the Torah of Moses your teacher. The Holy One, Blessed be He, placed wisdom in the heart of each and every one, and they all agreed to one common understanding. Not only did they all translate the text correctly, they all introduced the same changes into the translated text.
In general, Judaism is quite open to translation, even more open than my childhood Christian friends who more or less picked one translation over another. The baraisa above is quoted in reference to a mishna that Torah scrolls can be written in any language (even Greek, if you can believe it.) In fact, it used to be the practice that Torah scrolls would be read simultaneously in the original and in translation. Moreover, during these dual readings, the Talmud teaches that
The translator is not permitted to raise his voice louder than the reader. The converse is also true; and if the translator cannot raise his voice to match that of the reader, the reader should lower his voice and read.
I would argue that we should understand this not only as a comment on equality of literal volume, but also equality of metaphorical weight. And if the original Hebrew and the translation should be given equal weight, kal vachomer we must give equal weight to two different translations. At the queer yeshiva SVARA, much emphasis is placed on studying in the original. But in fact, I would argue the value of this comes from the multitude of translations and interpretations that result from each individual chevrusa. This multitude of equal translations results in more paradox, and less authority. Perhaps, where the unity of Ptolemy's translators was for the purpose of authority, the diversity of queer translations exists to help us actually hear the voice of haShem in the Torah of contradiction.
But even the attempted unity of Ptolemy's translators constructs contradictions when read with the original Torah. As mentioned earlier, when Sarah learns she is going to have a child she responds by laughing. In the Torah, we are told that she laughs "to herself". According to Ptolemy's translators, she laughs "among her relatives". Some commentators use these contradictory statements to derive a teaching about lashon hara (haShem rebukes Sarah because she didn't keep her laughter to herself), but we could imagine any numbers of ideas arising from this. Contradictions are generative, whether we seek to resolve them or let them sit, each side spoken at equal volume.
As another example, consider the case of Avraham and Sarah's names. They are both changed in this Torah portion: Avraham gets an extra hey, and Sarah has a yud changed to a hey. Avraham's name change is often cited in trans-affirming Jewish commentaries, because it leads to the following halakhic analysis in the Talmud:
Anyone who calls Abraham Abram transgresses a positive mitzva, as it is stated: “And your name will be Abraham”. Rabbi Eliezer says: One who calls Abraham Abram transgresses a negative mitzva, as it is stated: “And your name shall no longer be called Abram"
These commentaries almost never talk about Sarah's name change in this trans context, or about the later name change of Yaakov to Yisrael (for example, this excellent commentary by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg). There are many possible reasons, of course, but I wonder if one reason is because Sarah and Yaakov's name changes undercut the straightforward simplicity of the Avraham version. When we only pay attention to Avraham, we are taught one simple halakha: do not use someone's old name. But immediately after the quote regarding Avraham, the Talmud teaches that the mitzve to use Sarah's new name is only a mitzve for Avraham, and not for anyone else. And just before the quote regarding Avraham, the Talmud teaches that Yisrael is a primary name but does not fully supplant Yaakov.
If your goal is to make a simple d'oraisa case against deadnaming, then you are better off sticking to only the example with Avraham. But I don't really get why this would be useful, except as a rhetorical tool in the kind of Jewish circles that take the Talmud seriously. There's nothing a priori wrong with rhetorical tools, though this particular one will likely backfire quickly. But in the laughter analogy, this is Torah of the first two types: Torah of our own deep emotion, and Torah to control. There's nothing wrong with deep emotion, and of course we want to control the names people call us. But I'd be hard pressed to see listening for the voice of haShem in this exercise. It feels much more like using words of Torah to argue for something the person arguing already believes.
Moreover, look at what happens when we pay attention to the full daf, to the tensions that exist between the differing teachings regarding Avraham, Sarah, and Yaakov. When we do this, we get a much broader understanding of the ethics of name changes that includes more human experience. Here is just one way to understand these three teachings simultaneously: if someone tells you to use a particular name (even if it isn't the name everyone uses for them), treat them like Sarah, whose name change is only commanded of some, and use the name you are asked to use for them. If someone tells you they have multiple names, of which one is primary, follow their guidance as with Yaakov/Yisrael. And if someone tells you they have one name, and you should never use another, do so as with Avraham. For myself, I find this much more helpful in understanding my obligations than the Avraham case on its own, but of course there are many different ways to read this.
When I talk like this about sitting with paradox I always have my 19-year-old edgy atheist self in my head laughing at me. Isn't this why religion is absurd? But, to be honest with you all, I started coming to this conclusion not in the mold-filled attic beis midrash of my local shul, but in the asbestos-filled basement of the math building while working on my doctoral dissertation about the geometry of DNA.
There's this geometric object called a cube. Picture one, if you can, in your head. If you can't, grab a nearby D6 (you know you have one, you nerd.) It has eight corners, six faces, twelve edges. Now here's where things get a bit weird. You can think of an edge as long and thin, in which case the edge "ends" at the two corners it connects and "runs along/between" the two faces it bounds. But you could also think of the edge as short and wide, in which case the edge "ends" at the two faces it connects and "runs along/between" the corners it bounds. You can even play this game one edge at a time (with a slightly different topological setting) and so....what is a "corner" and what is a "face" really just depends on your point of view. But they can't be both, right?
This perspective is enormously useful in studying these kinds of geometric objects. You can get a lot done if you just pick one or the other, but when you allow both to exist in your conception of the object, so much more becomes possible. The paradox is generative, and listening to the paradox helps us uncover a deeper truth: a cube where the corners are corners and faces are faces and the object we get by making corners faces and faces corners are both instances of the true underlying object that varies between these extremes.
The physicist Niels Bohr made this point much more poetically. In asking "how do we distinguish a deep truth from a trivial truth", Bohr proposed the following: for a deep truth, its opposite is also true, while for a trivial truth, its opposite is false. (Niels Bohr, incidentally, both helped Jews escape the Nazis and served on the Manhattan Project.) Trivial truths don't necessarily lack value, but I wonder if they are not sometimes like the cube: instances of some deeper phenomenon at play. (Math and physics: the pomo sjws of the sciences.)
Maybe all of this is simply to say: if you are listening for Elohim, you need to listen to the paradoxes and contradictions that arise from making the many one and the one many. You need to listen to the Torah of reversal, and not (only) the Torah of emotion and control.
Well, fuck. Some of you were looking in all of this for a drash on "lekh lekha" and I have massively failed to deliver. But I can do that in two short sentences (just make sure to hold all of these equal in your mind):
The gematria of לך לך (lekh lekha: go for yourself) is the same as that of עבד (serve [others])
Live lekha, laugh lekha, love lekha (a collaboration-phrase with brin solomon)
gut shabes,
ada
p.s. Listen, there's some...hot takes in here. Let me know what you think by replying to this email or emailing quasiada@gmail.com directly. There's definitely parts of this I expect disagreement about -- goodness knows there's parts of this I'm already disagreeing about with myself.
p.p.s. If you found this interesting, feel free to forward to a friend!