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.

Tanners Pond Revisited

Cherry Valley Road sits in a small valley for much of its course.  Like Tanner Valley, Cherry Valley moves in a north south orientation:

It runs from the intersection of 11^th Street, all the way down to southern border of the village.  We can see the slight valley on this typographical map in the deeper green color:

At the north end of Cherry Valley Avenue are some of the “steep” hills we see in the north end of Tanners Valley:

The dry valley of Cherry Valley Road quickly becomes a stream just south of the village:

 

As detailed in Hidden Waters this stream flows down to Valley Stream Brook.  

Looking at the map further out there are only two dry valleys in Garden City:

Tanners Pond to the left, and Cherry Valley to the right, cross both the north and south border of Garden City.

Hidden Waters says this about the terminal point of Cherry Valley:

“To the north of Hempstead Turnpike on Cherry Valley Avenue, there is a public works storage yard. Often, public utilities such as salt storage, depots and garages used by local governments stand at sites once used for pumping stations, as I’ve found with the Kissena Park DOT storage yard.”

This is the Village of Garden City’s Department of Public Works Yard.  Just north of it is the Garden City Pool.  When I was a child trash was still being burned in the yard.   Sometimes when swimming, charred paper would fly into the pool.

 

This part of southern Garden City juts out unlike the other, more rectangular lines on the borders.  Could this have been a pumping station?  The 1926 aerial photo shows the outlines of the street only:

The 1950 aerial views shows more development, and perhaps the first buildings to become the pool, but no buildings where the municipal yard is now located.