Quick* little thought, nothing too serious.
Judaism does not have strong opinions on heaven and hell. I'm not enough of a Torah scholar to be sure that heaven is never mentioned as a place where dead people go, but I know that the amount I have read doesn't get much into notions of heaven, and I know for a fact that it leaves hell out of its cosmology. Its ideas of customs and practices and "rightness" aren't followed with a threat of divine punishment, the occasional flood aside; instead, the weight they carry is simply that Jewish practices are Jewish identity, and that to disregard them is to distance yourself from your Jewish faith and from the community as a whole.
(Incidentally, this is why the worst dogma I've experienced within the Jewish faith has literally been people telling me I'm "doing it wrong," a practice made worse by the fact that some branches of Judaism don't totally believe the other ones are real. But hey, that last part isn't exclusive to us.)
Instead, the Torah is a story about legacy: literally a tale written as an endless succession of generations, with different generations forming greater epochs, and the Torah's "books" telling the tales of different phases of Jewish life. Instead of heaven and hell, there is merely the notion that one generation begets the next, which is lent a profound weight. Human life, life in general, existence in general, is the story of succession. And it takes the structure, in a sense, of a garden: a gradual cultivation of a living, growing thing too knotty and organic to ever be thought of simply.
The book of Genesis begins with God planting the seeds of existence: literally seeding the order and emergence of existence from the most fundamental up to the most advanced. The sixth day is the emergence of consciousness, and the rest of the Torah becomes a tale of conscious life: an unending seventh day, in a sense, where God's creation takes on its own existence, and undergoes a more morally and culturally complex development than God is capable of managing.
(And a quick note on that: leaving aside that the first two human stories are both stories of humans pissing God off, and the third real story is of the entire species following suit, my favorite Bible story remains the book of Job, specifically the interpretation in which Job, rather than prostrating himself before God, becomes the one to judge God himself, and shames God, and says, more-or-less, "What you have done to me is wicked and awful, and it fills me with sorrow to have been made in your image." Because it is important to me, in this story where God is on some level sentient and non-abstract, that it is also a story in which humankind ultimately is responsible for itself, and refuses to merely be dependent playthings of some divine being. And I believe it was Jack Miles who pointed out that, if you're Christian, then Job is the last time God meddles with human beings whatsoever, before returning as Christ, to experience mortal suffering and forgive collective human sin, in a way that essentially passes on the divine mantle to humanity itself—should we choose to accept it.)
Back to gardening. The first story of humanity in the Bible is, of course, the story of our being kicked out of the divine garden that was made for us, because we chose consciousness and mortality over ignorant immortality—a beautiful metaphor for life, consciousness, and the joy and tragedy of being alive and knowing your own death, mixed with the ultimate responsibility of having to learn how to be good rather than evil, but also a tale that says: we will never be given a garden from up high. From now on, the only paradise we will ever know is the one we build ourselves. And indeed, the Torah is fascinated by kingdoms and would-be kingdoms of the Jewish people, because there is a sense that a holy city is what the entire faith is building towards, mixed with a saga of the Jewish people building those cities and empires, only to have them dissolve to nothing, because the Jewish people never live up to their own aspirations of holiness. (Which leads to the other central Jewish theme, which is that between our kingdoms, we are always strangers and nomads, persecuted by cruel outside forces, but surviving merely because we always preserve that lineage, that legacy, that endless bramble which we call history—again, we are always historians, which is why we chronicle the attempts to eradicate our memory and our own inevitable downfalls. Though an awful lot of us like to ignore the latter.)
The second human story is the tale of Cain and Abel, which mixes familial sin (and the first schism between family and faith) with another story about cultivation and gardening. Cain, the murderer, is a farmer; Abel, who is favored by God in a way that arouses Cain's envious wrath, is a shepherd. And there are many interpretations of why the farmer was looked over for the shepherd—is it that cultivating life is considered more valuable than merely cultivating the earth?—but it is curious that this tale is also a story of the first humans who were responsible for making something of the world they lived in, and for creating a life for themselves. God doesn't teach Cain and Abel how to do what they do; this is humans, taking God's earth and making it theirs. And in doing so, they immediately fracture it, their attempts at cultivation turning into the first divide between the family that becomes humanity.
Though it's curious also that God, in perhaps-unintentional ways, brings about that divide: through prejudice or ignorance or whim, God has a hand in our species' first truly evil act. While Cain cannot blame his cruelty on God, his evil is rooted in a suffering and an alienation that is born of God, not separate from God. Which brings to mind, for me, the Buddhist interpretation of nirvana as a freedom from suffering and from reincarnation; it is our suffering that leads to rebirth, because to identify with suffering, to define ourselves by the things we are attached to and thus struggle with, is to be possessed by that suffering, haunted by it, to the point that it lives through us.
The point of reincarnation, I think—at least, in this sense; I do not want to reduce it just to this one simplicity—is not just that our suffering leads us to make others suffer. It's that our sense of "I," our sense of separateness, is one and the same with our suffering, because it is what sets us apart and makes us see others as foreign. Only when we abandon this version of our "self" are we truly in unison with the world, capable of seeing our existence as something that doesn't start and stop with our mere consciousness or our life, which is why our death isn't the end of us, why we lose nothing when our life is over, and why, rather than reappearing in some new guise, the "I" of us is truly over: we at last "are one with the universe," and pass no sense of identity onward, because we exist in a richer and more encompassing form than mere identity would allow.
Returning to the Torah, though: Genesis 5 is often brought up jokingly (or dismissively) by people who'd like to critique the notion that the Torah, or the Bible, is "the greatest book ever written." Because how would any sort of compelling book have a whole opening chapter about strangers begetting strangers, generations of family following one another without any details about their lives? If what you want is merely a series of lurid family stories, sure, this is weird; in keeping with this idea that Judaism is the story of a family and a garden and a legacy, though, this is a moment in which the family lays down its roots. Generations pass; the garden expands; when we return, and meet Noah, all we need to know is that we are no longer dealing with the direct consequences of Cain's sin. We are dealing with its legacy—a legacy so awful that God returns and feels the need to wipe it from the Earth, keeping the one strain that seems worth preserving. At which point, Noah starts again, and tries again, and the toils and struggles of humanity become subtler and stranger and more unfathomable, as is the way with this kind of thing.
On some level, it's a little subversive to me that Judaism places such an emphasis on family and legacy: that it substitutes heaven with humanity itself, and seems to ask, "What if this is all we have? What if our generation is all we'll ever know? What if the most we can possibly hope for is an opportunity to see our children, and our children's children—literally or metaphorically—live in a world that's closer to heaven than ours was?"
On another level, of course, there are all kinds of ways to critique this kind of insularity, and tribalism in general. I feel like that critique, however, ought to find a way of embracing the best aspects of this story while remaining aware of, and understanding well enough not to replicate, its worst possible implications. The narrative of persistence despite persecution is powerful regardless of whether or not you're Jewish, and I think that identity at its best becomes a way of finding solidarity, and of persisting through suffering. And the Torah itself is the story of generation after generation of Jew misunderstanding the meaning of their own story, and succumbing to cruelty and wickedness themselves, so at the very least, we can't say that we weren't warned.
My own faith is too complicated to start and end with Judaism. I describe myself as secular above anything else; the practice I feel most strongly about is Taoism; the faith I take the most practical things away from is likely Buddhism. (And Christianity fascinates me, though I could never start to call myself "a believer.") But my Jewish roots run the deepest; I am shaped by the faith I was raised in, in ways I will likely never fully comprehend. I think constantly about how much those tales of outsiders and wanderers shaped me, about how naturally I think of myself as someone who doesn't belong, and whose story is one of journey. And when I think of "my people," I often think in terms of pilgrimage, and of my friends as fellow travelers, brought together most of all by our restless need to travel.
I don't care much for kingdoms, or for empires of any kind, but I do wonder whether the ones I love and I will ever form a garden of our own. A little grove, a pocket of heaven—or as much heaven as we can manage—that we can pass along, not only to our literal families, but to our fellow weary travelers, lost and looking for home. I am passionate about utopia, but I try to keep my thoughts pragmatic on that front; at times, I wonder how much of that pragmatism comes from my upbringing. Not just from the sense of rising and falling fortunes and families and nations, but from the more profound sense of duty that legacy entails: the idea that, maybe just maybe, the holiest of all deeds is to take part in the creation of a culture, to give rise to something resembling civilization, and to recognize tradition's purpose as a way of simultaneously laying down a social practice that keeps people together and helps them be good to one another, while also recording a history, a tale of how we've come to be, why we are the things we are. A tale that ultimately, beneath every generation, every hero and every love affair and every tragic folly, exists to affirm its own meaning, and remind us all that life has roots, civilization has its origin story, and humanity itself is something grown, with faith—in a sense—being the fertile ground in which we grow it. Not as something preordained, or as a paean to God (and I don't think you need to orient your life around God at all, let alone celebrate God as meaningful, for any of this to be true), but as the deepest truth of our species, of conscious life, of the joy and the burden and the privilege of being able to live, being able to act, being able to know good from evil, and being able to stray towards evil just as easily as we might bend ourselves back towards goodness once again.
Not forever, but for now.
Judaism does not have strong opinions on heaven and hell. I'm not enough of a Torah scholar to be sure that heaven is never mentioned as a place where dead people go, but I know that the amount I have read doesn't get much into notions of heaven, and I know for a fact that it leaves hell out of its cosmology. Its ideas of customs and practices and "rightness" aren't followed with a threat of divine punishment, the occasional flood aside; instead, the weight they carry is simply that Jewish practices are Jewish identity, and that to disregard them is to distance yourself from your Jewish faith and from the community as a whole.
(Incidentally, this is why the worst dogma I've experienced within the Jewish faith has literally been people telling me I'm "doing it wrong," a practice made worse by the fact that some branches of Judaism don't totally believe the other ones are real. But hey, that last part isn't exclusive to us.)
Instead, the Torah is a story about legacy: literally a tale written as an endless succession of generations, with different generations forming greater epochs, and the Torah's "books" telling the tales of different phases of Jewish life. Instead of heaven and hell, there is merely the notion that one generation begets the next, which is lent a profound weight. Human life, life in general, existence in general, is the story of succession. And it takes the structure, in a sense, of a garden: a gradual cultivation of a living, growing thing too knotty and organic to ever be thought of simply.
The book of Genesis begins with God planting the seeds of existence: literally seeding the order and emergence of existence from the most fundamental up to the most advanced. The sixth day is the emergence of consciousness, and the rest of the Torah becomes a tale of conscious life: an unending seventh day, in a sense, where God's creation takes on its own existence, and undergoes a more morally and culturally complex development than God is capable of managing.
(And a quick note on that: leaving aside that the first two human stories are both stories of humans pissing God off, and the third real story is of the entire species following suit, my favorite Bible story remains the book of Job, specifically the interpretation in which Job, rather than prostrating himself before God, becomes the one to judge God himself, and shames God, and says, more-or-less, "What you have done to me is wicked and awful, and it fills me with sorrow to have been made in your image." Because it is important to me, in this story where God is on some level sentient and non-abstract, that it is also a story in which humankind ultimately is responsible for itself, and refuses to merely be dependent playthings of some divine being. And I believe it was Jack Miles who pointed out that, if you're Christian, then Job is the last time God meddles with human beings whatsoever, before returning as Christ, to experience mortal suffering and forgive collective human sin, in a way that essentially passes on the divine mantle to humanity itself—should we choose to accept it.)
Back to gardening. The first story of humanity in the Bible is, of course, the story of our being kicked out of the divine garden that was made for us, because we chose consciousness and mortality over ignorant immortality—a beautiful metaphor for life, consciousness, and the joy and tragedy of being alive and knowing your own death, mixed with the ultimate responsibility of having to learn how to be good rather than evil, but also a tale that says: we will never be given a garden from up high. From now on, the only paradise we will ever know is the one we build ourselves. And indeed, the Torah is fascinated by kingdoms and would-be kingdoms of the Jewish people, because there is a sense that a holy city is what the entire faith is building towards, mixed with a saga of the Jewish people building those cities and empires, only to have them dissolve to nothing, because the Jewish people never live up to their own aspirations of holiness. (Which leads to the other central Jewish theme, which is that between our kingdoms, we are always strangers and nomads, persecuted by cruel outside forces, but surviving merely because we always preserve that lineage, that legacy, that endless bramble which we call history—again, we are always historians, which is why we chronicle the attempts to eradicate our memory and our own inevitable downfalls. Though an awful lot of us like to ignore the latter.)
The second human story is the tale of Cain and Abel, which mixes familial sin (and the first schism between family and faith) with another story about cultivation and gardening. Cain, the murderer, is a farmer; Abel, who is favored by God in a way that arouses Cain's envious wrath, is a shepherd. And there are many interpretations of why the farmer was looked over for the shepherd—is it that cultivating life is considered more valuable than merely cultivating the earth?—but it is curious that this tale is also a story of the first humans who were responsible for making something of the world they lived in, and for creating a life for themselves. God doesn't teach Cain and Abel how to do what they do; this is humans, taking God's earth and making it theirs. And in doing so, they immediately fracture it, their attempts at cultivation turning into the first divide between the family that becomes humanity.
Though it's curious also that God, in perhaps-unintentional ways, brings about that divide: through prejudice or ignorance or whim, God has a hand in our species' first truly evil act. While Cain cannot blame his cruelty on God, his evil is rooted in a suffering and an alienation that is born of God, not separate from God. Which brings to mind, for me, the Buddhist interpretation of nirvana as a freedom from suffering and from reincarnation; it is our suffering that leads to rebirth, because to identify with suffering, to define ourselves by the things we are attached to and thus struggle with, is to be possessed by that suffering, haunted by it, to the point that it lives through us.
The point of reincarnation, I think—at least, in this sense; I do not want to reduce it just to this one simplicity—is not just that our suffering leads us to make others suffer. It's that our sense of "I," our sense of separateness, is one and the same with our suffering, because it is what sets us apart and makes us see others as foreign. Only when we abandon this version of our "self" are we truly in unison with the world, capable of seeing our existence as something that doesn't start and stop with our mere consciousness or our life, which is why our death isn't the end of us, why we lose nothing when our life is over, and why, rather than reappearing in some new guise, the "I" of us is truly over: we at last "are one with the universe," and pass no sense of identity onward, because we exist in a richer and more encompassing form than mere identity would allow.
Returning to the Torah, though: Genesis 5 is often brought up jokingly (or dismissively) by people who'd like to critique the notion that the Torah, or the Bible, is "the greatest book ever written." Because how would any sort of compelling book have a whole opening chapter about strangers begetting strangers, generations of family following one another without any details about their lives? If what you want is merely a series of lurid family stories, sure, this is weird; in keeping with this idea that Judaism is the story of a family and a garden and a legacy, though, this is a moment in which the family lays down its roots. Generations pass; the garden expands; when we return, and meet Noah, all we need to know is that we are no longer dealing with the direct consequences of Cain's sin. We are dealing with its legacy—a legacy so awful that God returns and feels the need to wipe it from the Earth, keeping the one strain that seems worth preserving. At which point, Noah starts again, and tries again, and the toils and struggles of humanity become subtler and stranger and more unfathomable, as is the way with this kind of thing.
On some level, it's a little subversive to me that Judaism places such an emphasis on family and legacy: that it substitutes heaven with humanity itself, and seems to ask, "What if this is all we have? What if our generation is all we'll ever know? What if the most we can possibly hope for is an opportunity to see our children, and our children's children—literally or metaphorically—live in a world that's closer to heaven than ours was?"
On another level, of course, there are all kinds of ways to critique this kind of insularity, and tribalism in general. I feel like that critique, however, ought to find a way of embracing the best aspects of this story while remaining aware of, and understanding well enough not to replicate, its worst possible implications. The narrative of persistence despite persecution is powerful regardless of whether or not you're Jewish, and I think that identity at its best becomes a way of finding solidarity, and of persisting through suffering. And the Torah itself is the story of generation after generation of Jew misunderstanding the meaning of their own story, and succumbing to cruelty and wickedness themselves, so at the very least, we can't say that we weren't warned.
My own faith is too complicated to start and end with Judaism. I describe myself as secular above anything else; the practice I feel most strongly about is Taoism; the faith I take the most practical things away from is likely Buddhism. (And Christianity fascinates me, though I could never start to call myself "a believer.") But my Jewish roots run the deepest; I am shaped by the faith I was raised in, in ways I will likely never fully comprehend. I think constantly about how much those tales of outsiders and wanderers shaped me, about how naturally I think of myself as someone who doesn't belong, and whose story is one of journey. And when I think of "my people," I often think in terms of pilgrimage, and of my friends as fellow travelers, brought together most of all by our restless need to travel.
I don't care much for kingdoms, or for empires of any kind, but I do wonder whether the ones I love and I will ever form a garden of our own. A little grove, a pocket of heaven—or as much heaven as we can manage—that we can pass along, not only to our literal families, but to our fellow weary travelers, lost and looking for home. I am passionate about utopia, but I try to keep my thoughts pragmatic on that front; at times, I wonder how much of that pragmatism comes from my upbringing. Not just from the sense of rising and falling fortunes and families and nations, but from the more profound sense of duty that legacy entails: the idea that, maybe just maybe, the holiest of all deeds is to take part in the creation of a culture, to give rise to something resembling civilization, and to recognize tradition's purpose as a way of simultaneously laying down a social practice that keeps people together and helps them be good to one another, while also recording a history, a tale of how we've come to be, why we are the things we are. A tale that ultimately, beneath every generation, every hero and every love affair and every tragic folly, exists to affirm its own meaning, and remind us all that life has roots, civilization has its origin story, and humanity itself is something grown, with faith—in a sense—being the fertile ground in which we grow it. Not as something preordained, or as a paean to God (and I don't think you need to orient your life around God at all, let alone celebrate God as meaningful, for any of this to be true), but as the deepest truth of our species, of conscious life, of the joy and the burden and the privilege of being able to live, being able to act, being able to know good from evil, and being able to stray towards evil just as easily as we might bend ourselves back towards goodness once again.
Not forever, but for now.