The Torah of Pairs: the single torah

If the Torah is not one but two, where does the concept Unity of the Torah arise?  We must search for it in unusual places.  There are places where Two become One(s) in the Torah.  Take the wives/sister tales. 

The Father of Cain / The Father of Abel & Seth

 

In Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer we read this about Eve, the Serpent, and Sammael in the Garden:

Sammael is riding the serpent, and in turn, Sammael has relations with Eve, and she conceives.  At the same time, Adam has relations with Eve, and she conceives again.  Cain is not the offspring of Adam.  His father is Sammael, a divine being, as the text states:

Cain is half human and half divine.  We read this further down in the text, where there is a summary of Adam's reproductive activity:

Seth is born fully human, and therefore, capable of receiving the Torah, as divine human hybrids are neither fully in need of the Torah, or fully free of the body that needs the Torah as a halter.  The human race has two strains:

Are there still those who seek to see the Children of Cain in the light of day?  Are these those who search in secret?

The Two Torah Problem

There is nothing unsound about positing two Torahs.   From the top of Sinai, Moses received the written and oral Torah(s).  They are the same Torah, but in two formats.  Yet how can we say that they are not two?

Other concepts of two, or dualisms, have a come complicated relationship in Judaism.  There can be put One Power to the Universe.  If HaShem cedes power to another entity (an angel, a force, a sefiortot) it is because the Governor delegated that power.  And in another view, that delegation is an illusion.  The maximalist view holds that there is nothing but HaShem - The Existent.  Humans needs to view things in gradations, but God has no such limitations.

We can understand the reluctance of the Tradition to postulate two Torahs: a Divine and an Earthly.  A Torah for Now and a Torah for Later.  Who is to say when that time comes?  Who is to say when one Torah supersedes another?  This is dangerous terriority.

But some have desired this model to enact certain obscure distinctions.   If there is a Heavenly Torah, do not some gifted human, through their efforts, get to reads its pages?  And if they do, are those people no longer obliged to follow the Earthly Torah?  But we do not live in the realm of the Heavenly Torah.  Our Torah is here.  Is it not incumbent upon us to only hint at the Heavenly Torah, while reading its Earthly Copy?

Notes on the Kaifeng Jews

 

Please see my new blog:

Notes on the Kaifeng Jews

The Jews of Venice

 

Harry Freedman writes excellent popular books on Jewish subjects, and his Shylock's Venice: The Remarkable History of Venice's Jews is no different.  The Venice Jewish community looms large in the annals of Jewish history; it was surprising to me that they never numbered more than five thousand.  Read this book and learn about their sustained success in a time and place which should have prevented them from becoming a great Jewish society.

A Counter Narrative

 

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon is a very engaging build, decentered the male-centric game of biology at every turn.  Bohannon creates a compelling counter-narrative of the centrality of the female body in mammals.  At times rare time the theories propounded here seem a bit far-fetched, but this does not take from the overall excellent research.

Octavia Butler's Kindred

 

Certainly there is much to be said about Butler's work, but Kindred fell short of my expectations.  I tried, and stopped, reading this novel several times, and decided I would read it regardless.  It was difficult to understand the mechanism of the time travel (yes, it just happens).  That is fine, but reality was never suspended for me.  The novel felt like a forced exploration of a topic that is important, and probably hard to write, but in there somewhere.  It is just hard to see what Butler was after in this novel.