Yesterday I wrote about etzem suggesting both identity (sameness) and independence and asked how two such apparently opposite meanings of the same term could be reconciled. Earlier this month I had also written about salvation versus resurrection (wordpress 2018/04/07) These were the opening paragraphs of that blog:

Resurrection is very infrequently cited in the Torah. In its rare expressions, it is most often interpreted as a vision of glory at the end of days. But try reading it as a nightmare of the end of days when ignorant nostalgia governs, when dead zombies take power, when the shades enter daily life and hide the rays of sun behind a dark cloud, when those who sleep in the dust of the earth on gold-plated beds awake to reproach all others and spread abhorrence and hatred. (Daniel 12:2).

The vision of resurrection is not something to be celebrated, as the rabbis and Jesus did, but to be feared and eschewed. The monster in the black lagoon may now be coloured green as in The Shape of Water and in our imaginations and apparitions, but the real danger lies in the monstrosity of breath entering the dry bones of a dead past, dry bones covered with sinews and flesh, dry bones made to breathe and live again, when those should have been left in the slow decaying heap where they belonged and left to return to dust. (Ezekiel vv:1-2) The goal should be to deliver the Promised Land to our children and our children’s children and not to those lifted out of their graves.

Yesterday, however, I wrote about Adam falling asleep in the Garden of Eden story and God removing one of his ribs to fashion a woman viewed by this archetypal male as simply an extension of his own body. In this story, Eve is created out of a living bone, not a dry, dead one. It is not a story of resurrection, but of material projection. Recall that in Genesis I, on the sixth day of creation, long before this night dream of the creation of woman, God had already created man and woman, though man alone was created in His image. This, contrary to most interpretations, is not a blessing but a curse.  For the Jewish God is a very unimaginative one. He has little sense of the music of the spheres and of artistry. He is a craftsman with an attention to detail and precision. He is a scientist, absolutely marvelous at bringing objects and things into existence.

Humans are an example. They are embodied creatures, fertile, capable of reproduction, but also of rule. For man was made in the image of God to rule over all created things. What is created is viewed as good (or bad) and not as beautiful or ugly. God cannot smell. God cannot taste. Everything has been made for utility. God can pronounce what He creates as good, but not as embodying the beautiful. The sun and moon are placed in the heavens to dominate, to separate light from darkness and allow consciousness and knowledge of the external world and its exploitation to take place. God is also a mad scientist who can give birth to a monster out of a desire to objectify Himself in the flesh. And then that creation blessed with a divine spirit will do what God does, blame others for all the problems that result rather than taking responsibility for His own mistakes.

How was that initial rule based on responsibility for the creation but irresponsibility for the management demonstrated? By giving man the power and the ability to engage in taxonomy, to use his brain to classify and categorize all things. Not to relate to them as things to touch and smell and wallow in their beauty. And not even to manage them properly. Man is given the power of naming, the same power God had but with one difference. God named, and the thing came into being. Man named what already existed and the thing came into being in thought, in consciousness. However, unlike God, images and fantasies came into being in and out of the human imagination.

Why did Adam, why did man need a helper? It was not to name things. He could do that on his own. It was for the same reason God created man and woman in the first place – to be His toadies. Man and woman were to be His surrogates in managing the material world. After all, God lacked a body. Man and woman were created in the image of God with the capacity to rule and administer. Man, however, right from the get-go, dreamed he was like God, that woman was created as his own projection, as an extension of his own flesh rather than as an independent being. For man, only God has independence. Only God has absolute autonomy. Embodied being entails dependence.

But as the stories unfold in both Genesis and Exodus, it becomes very clear that what man lacks most is a sense of independence and responsibility – for himself and for another. This is also true of God. God depends on man. God needs man to execute His will. Further, God is Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh. I shall be who I shall be. God is the god of self-revelation.

One reader of my blog informed me of Jerome M. Segal’s book, Joseph’s Bones. (I have not as yet obtained a copy let alone read it.) But my reader informed me that the book “ends with the burial of Joseph’s bones at Shechem. This action represents the ongoing wishes of the Israelites for a just God who will judge individuals instead of the collectivity. Joseph represents what Israelites want God to be: the One who knows us as individuals and the One who can forgive individuals. The Israelites brought two arks through the desert to Canaan. One was the Ark of God’s law and the other the ark containing the bones of the compassionate Joseph.” Therefore, I want to jump to Joseph’s bones to thrown light on the creation of Eve in Adam’s imagination as “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.”

Why did Joseph exact an oath from the children of Israel that they would bring his bones up from Egypt? (Genesis 50:24-26) [I have drawn much of this material from my daughter, Rachel, and several of her lectures on Joseph’s bones, primarily her class on the nexus between homeland and exile, a lecture she delivered at Hebrew College this past Monday.] Why was it so important to bury Joseph’s bones in Shechem? And why is this an archetypal tale of redemption and the fulfilment of God’s promise to redeem Israel? What is wrong with the interpretation of Daniel’s vision of resurrection coming at the end of days as consisting of individual resurrection as promulgated by many rabbis, most Pharisees, about the messianic age during the late Second Temple period in opposition to the Sadducees? (Josephus, Antiquities xviii) A plain reading of the text suggests that the Joseph reburial narrative is a parable of the reuniting of the two kingdoms and the resurrection of Israel as a nation. (37:2-11)

“These bones are the whole House of Israel.” The dead bones represent the consciousness of Jews in the diaspora who had lost hope in Israel’s resurrection. Spiritual death is the loss of hope. These are not the bones of Daniel divided into those who lived just lives and those who did not, with resurrection reserved only for the just. Rather, a Jew is not simply an individual, but one deeply embedded in a family and a nation. In exile, as refugees, the spirit of a people lives to some degree in suspended animation. (Cf. Jon D. Levenson (2006) Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life)

Note that in Genesis Chapter 2, verse 22 about Eve as a projection of Adam, as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, there is no staging as in the resurrection where the bones are first covered with sinews and then flesh and then skin and finally they are infused with the breath of life. Eve is instantly created as a living being from a bone. It is a very different kind of parable, one of fantasy rather than hope. God created man and woman. They were equal except in one sense. Only man was made in the image of God. And that was not something good. For man, unlike woman, was prone to fantasize that he could be like God, that he could aspire as a narcissist and megalomaniac to envision himself as the ruler of all humanity as well as of all the rest of nature. Such a visions of rule began with a belief that woman was not an independent conscious being, but an extension of himself.

How do we know this vision of the bringing to life of woman is a male fantasy? It takes place when Adam is asleep. It runs contrary to a plausible tale told in the previous chapter that humans emerged from the brine of evolution together. Man is borne by a woman and is born from the womb of a woman; man suffers from womb envy. As in dreams, there is no staging; the events spring seemingly out of nowhere. Rule is envisioned as solitary rather than shared. Rule is envisioned as a projection of self rather than a responsibility assigned to humans as nations, as collectivities. It is a classical narcissist fantasy – the other is merely an extension and reflection of me.

But why bones? Why flesh of my flesh? Because the other then only has a material existence. Only the male is an embodied spirit. Adam in his fantasy world has pulled off a coup. Why? To get away from parental (and responsible) governance, only to become totally dependent on woman. He is someone who clings to his wife. In the quest for divine power, the male becomes a supine infantile creature. And the self is envisioned in terms of possessive individualism and a material existence where the woman is the objectification of a male fantasy. At the same time, underneath it all, that selfsame male reveals himself to be a clinging male totally dependent on the Other for recognition and acceptance. Beneath the boastfulness and the bravura one can only find a whimpering infant needing appreciation from the very same creature he views simply as an objectification.

In contrast, Joseph dies, period. His resurrection involves only reburial in the proper place for the birth and rebirth of a nation. Further, Joseph is the most feminized of all the male characters in the Torah. Whatever the necessity for a martial spirit in defence of the nation, whatever the need to engage in manipulation in the exercise of power, the spirit of the nation must be one of compassion, one of caring, one of attention and sensitivity to others. Further, to live on hope and realize aspirations, one must be able to interpret dreams, to distinguish fantasy from reality. Consciousness may entail naming and categorization, classification and objectification. But etzem is a product of the imagination.

It is on that psychological, social and political foundation that the spirit of a nation will emerge and develop. This is the base for conveying how identity, how sameness, can be reconciled with independence.

To be continued

With the help of Alex Zisman