Lech Lecha

Now it came to pass, that there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to dwell there, for the famine was severe in the land. And it came to pass, when he was close to entering Egypt, that he said to Sarai his wife, "Verily I know that you are a woman of a beautiful countenance. Therefore it will happen, when the Egyptians see you, that they will say, 'This is his wife'; and they will kill me, but they will let you live." – Gen 12:10-12

To recap, monsieur Abram: you need to head into Egypt, because there's no food in Israel, and you're worried that when the Egyptians see you with Sarai, who is a regulation hottie, they will kill you so they can have her. Fair enough (assuming they're both horny and unprincipled), that's a legitimate concern. So... how are you gonna get yourself out of this one?

"Please say you are my sister, that it may be well with me for your sake, and that I may live because of you." - Gen 12:13

Um... what?

"Please say you are my sister, that it may be well with me for your sake, and that-"

Yeah, dude. I heard you... I'm just... WHAT? That's your brilliant plan? Tell everyone she's your sister? Oh that's really clever... then the Egyptians won't feel that they need to kill you before they kidnap and rape her. THEN THEY'LL JUST KIDNAP AND RAPE HER WITHOUT KILLING YOU FIRST. FUCKING BRILLIANT PLAN THERE, ABE.

So it was, when Abram came into Egypt, that the Egyptians saw the woman, that she was very beautiful. The princes of Pharaoh also saw her and commended her to Pharoah. And the woman was taken to Pharoah's house. - Gen 12:14-15

Sigh.

For those of you following along at home, God does eventually step in and pestilence the fuck out of Pharoah, causing him to release Sarai. But honestly, Abram, you can’t keep relying on God to pick up the slack in your shitty plans. I’m not gonna get all up in your grill about it this time, but I don’t want to see that kind of bullshit from you again.

Now, moving on….

Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said in his heart, "Will a child be born to a man one hundred years old? And will Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?" - Gen 12:17

I believe this is history’s first recorded ROFL.

This is My covenant which you shall keep, between Me and you and your descendants after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised. And you shall be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between Me and you. He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised, every male child in your generations, he who is born in your house or bought with money from any foreigner who is not of your seed. - Gen 17:10-12

Jewish boys today are circumcised. The ritual is called brit milah, and is considered one of the most important aspects of Jewish family life. It’s very much the done thing: you circumcise your son.

Circumcision seems to me to be the most glaring horror of modern Judaism. We used to regularly perpetrate conquest and persecution and genocide on God’s orders, but we’ve stopped all that now. Yet we continue to mutilate the genitals of every male born to our people. The situation is so exceedingly bizarre that I am often stunned into simple denial. “No, we can’t possibly be doing something that horrendous right now.” Yes, we are. Entirely sound pieces of the human body are being forcibly removed by sharp instruments for absolutely no good reason. And all this is done in an atmosphere of not merely apathy, but merriment. The assembled masses laugh and sing and eat and mingle whilst the baby wails, as newborns are wont to do when sharp instruments are visited upon them, unaccompanied, it should be noted, by anesthetic.

To this vile farce is sometimes added the feeble justification of supposed health benefits. Some studies may (or may not) indicate that circumcision lowers the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). To the best of my knowledge, the jury is still out on this.

On the issue of alleged protection that circumcision gives against STDs, I feel that I must point out the obvious. Sex with condoms is safe. Sex without condoms is NOT safe. Any other factors are so trivial as to be irrelevant. Anyone who circumcises their child with the hope that it will prevent the contraction of an STD is essentially following this line of reasoning: “Circumcision has been shown to lower rates of STD contraction. Therefore, I should hack at my child's genitals with a sharp knife. In the event that he is ever stupid enough to have unprotected sex with an STD carrier, this will slightly reduce his risk of infection.” Bravo, fucker.

Ultimately, even if it were conclusively demonstrated that circumcision did lower rates of infection in later life, it is neither the parents’ nor the rabbis’ place to make such a permanent choice on the child’s behalf. It ought to be delayed until the boy is much older and in possession of such faculties as are necessary to decide whether the benefits of perpetuating the covenant of Abraham and potentially engaging in slightly-safer-unsafe-sex are worth the cost of losing a chunk of his penis.

Noach

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud. And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. – Gen 9:12-15

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” - Carl Sagan

An argument is as strong as its weakest point. I propose we look at the “little God” idea in the context of Parashat Noach, just when God is going about his business of flooding the whole planet. An undertaking of such grand scale has not been seen since a week ago in Bereishit, and, as long as God’s sky-mnemonic suffices, shall not be seen again.

It seems that the Bible can be read in one of two main ways; either it is the eternal word of Almighty God, or it is a hodge-podge collection of Bronze Age mythology (other fascinating possibilities will be covered in later posts). If one wishes to pick one of these options with any reasonable degree of certainty, I’d recommend some solid reading on theology and theodicy and comparative religion first. But to take a far less intellectually rigorous and more fun approach: which does it seem like?

A couple of things seem instantly apparent from the above verse. The first is that God’s grasp of prismatic physics is woefully poor. Further; the God of the Hebrews fights with human weapons, like bows (I believe there is a Midrash which points out that the bow is depicted facing away from the Earth to symbolise God’s restraint of His vicious intent).

As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. – Gen 8:22

God’s apparent interest in the particulars of agriculture is a little off-putting. Did He really build this entire universe and all its dizzying mechanics just so the amazingly primitive, ape-descended life forms on one little blue-green planet orbiting a small unregarded yellow sun, far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy (Adams 1979), should be able to plant and harvest their crops?

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. – Gen 6:19-20

Why is it that the God of the Hebrews never seems to know any more than the average, reasonably well-informed tribesman of archaic Judea? One might forgive such a tribesman for being ignorant of asexual reproduction. But surely the Almighty Himself would have mentioned it:

Don’t bother taking two of those lizards in; just take one – the species is parthenogenetic. Never mind what that means, your race will figure it out in a couple of thousand years. Just do what I say, or I’ll smite you. - Not in the Bible

Once again, none of this is very good evidence against the divinity of the Bible. There are other places for that. I merely find it interesting to swap spectacles around whilst I read, and marvel at how profoundly different the text looks from a slightly different angle.

Bereishit

The foundational text of Monotheism starts, sensibly enough, at the very beginning. “Let there be light” seems reasonable. “Let there be a firmament” works fine, too. But we are given cause to pause when Day Six rolls around and the good Lord unexpectedly declares: “let us make man!” (Emphasis mine; italics rarely appear in the original Hebrew.)

As so often happens, the Midrash provides the answer long before you’ve asked the question.

Rabbi Shemuel bar Nahman said in the name of Rabbi Yonatan: While Moshe was writing the Torah, he wrote what was created on each day [of Creation]. When he reached this verse, “God said: Let us make man in our image, as our likeness” – he said: “Lord of the universe, why are you giving a pretext to the heretics?”

He answered him: “Write; a person who wishes to be mistaken will be mistaken.” (Bereishit Rabba [Vilna], parasha 8)

It seems that even that single condition is frequently redundant; a person will be mistaken regardless of whether he wishes to be mistaken. The simplest demonstration of this fact is that, at a bare minimum, two-thirds of the world’s population have picked the wrong religion. Further evidence can be found in any robust democracy: a very substantial minority invariably votes the “wrong” way. We make bad choices about our jobs, our studies, our purchases and our relationships. As a species, our favourite pastime seems to be walking around with our eyes resolutely shut.

Over the coming year, I intend to write my thoughts on the weekly parashah. I will write about what I find enchanting, and what I find distasteful. Doubtless I will offend some. If you are one who is easily offended, this planet may not be for you.

I cannot give you Truth. Heck, ignorant as I am, I can hardly give you Knowledge. But Entertainment seems like an altogether more reasonable goal. Some Stimulation may well be in order. And we shall, I hope, have Fun.

Confucius noted that the man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. And I think no more can be asked of any man, than to stand tall, when the situation calls for it, and proclaim: “These are my stones!”