Torah Told Different

Stories for a Pan/Poly/Post-Denominational World

Andrew Ramer

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498281010
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie juive

What Dorothy discovered in Oz and Alice discovered in Wonderland you'll discover here: a parallel reality where a third temple rose and fell in antiquity, women were ordained in the fifth century CE, and alternate sages and texts ripple in and out of the ones we know from history. This work of midrash, interpretive stories, opens with: Before God began to create anything, before there was heaven or earth, night or day, good or bad, in or out, up or down, God said, "I must create Myself."and heads toward its conclusion with: It was late afternoon. Tirzah, the designated messiah for our planet, was sitting in her study, up in sixth heaven.These are two of the ways in which this book is different. Liturgist and midrash writer Andrew Ramer not only reinvents Jewish history. He also reinvents his own family, the Talmud, and the Hebrew Bible, adding excerpts from texts by some of our ancient women sages, inviting you to ask yourself, "What does it mean to be a Jew in the twenty-first century? What grounds me and guides me in our tradition? And what gives me hope and dreams in a troubled world of trembling possibilities?"

1

Twice Upon a Time

The Torah begins with two entirely different creation stories. The first one starts with chaos, then moves in a stately fashion toward God declaring that everything He created is, “Tov ma’od, very good.” Conversely, the second story begins in an orderly fashion and ends with the painful expulsion of the first two human beings from the Garden of Eden.

I understand this duality. I understand Eden and the loss of Eden. When I was small, Eden was our backyard. I had my first spiritual experience there when I was five, lying on the warm grass beneath a bank of honeysuckle blossoms with my best friend Janie. Sunlight was streaming down through the branches of two large trees, a horse chestnut and a pin oak. Bees were buzzing all around us, and all at once I knew, knew in a deep embodied way, that just as the bees were dipping in and out of those sweet fragrant blossoms, over and over again—that everything that exists comes from and goes back to a Something that I did not think to call God that day.

I had my first experience of radical disconnection a year later, lying on the grass by myself, looking up at the sky, when by blinking I discovered that each of my eyes sees the sky as a slightly different color, more what I call blue with my right eye and gray with my left. Discovering that about myself thrust me out of Eden, out of unity, by shattering the innate connection I’d been living in, between words, the world, and my experience of it. “Roses are red, violets are blue.” But, which red, which blue? (To this day I prefer the blue sky of my right eye and the green grass of my left.)

My Jewish education also consists of two different stories, one happening right after the other. My first Hebrew School teachers were women who told us wonderful stories, about the mythical beasts on Noah’s ark and about Abraham breaking his father Terach’s idols. But when we were old enough to start learning Hebrew, our teachers were suddenly all men, and I was stunned and saddened as we began to read the Torah itself—because the stories I loved weren’t there, just the bare bones of them. Later I learned that those stories about stories that I first heard and fell in love with are called ‘midrashim: inquiries, investigations,’ and to this day I prefer those baroque explorations to the bony versions we find in the written Torah.

From the beginning of our reading of Genesis, all of us, girls and boys alike, noticed who was missing from the text. We read that Adam and Eve had Cain, Abel, and then Seth, and we understood that; but when we read that Cain and Seth had children, all of us asked, “If there was no one else in the world but them and their parents—who were their wives, who were the mothers of their children?” The answer we were given by our male teacher was another midrash: “Each of them was born with a twin sister.” Even as a boy I wondered, “Why didn’t the Torah just say that?” And we wondered too, “Why did Jacob have so many sons and only one daughter?” But there was no midrash for that.

Twice upon a time.

We were taught that Moses received not one but two Torahs from God, one written and one oral. And when we came to the second, and different, version of the Ten Commandments, we were taught another midrash, a lovely one, that the children of Israel heard God stating both of them at the very same time; an aural version of my visual experience. Two becoming one.

Judith the Wise said:

God created through words. Therefore words tell us about the God who said: “Let there be,” and there was. Therefore the most true thing is a story. And we are a people of stories.

The Alexandrian Talmud, Tractate “Splendor”

Over the years my Jewish education deepened, only to be abandoned a year after my bar mitzvah. I came back to it in college, earned a degree in Jewish Studies, and then abandoned it again for decades. I never abandoned my Jewishness or my love of Jewish stories, and in those intervening years I became a storyteller myself, a writer of midrashim, of stories that riff on Torah. My first book, little pictures, published in 1987 and long out of print, is lacking in capital letters, filled with illustrations I did myself, and begins with a series of improbable creation stories that were inspired by the Torah.

By Torah I mean: The Five Books of Moses. I mean, by extension, the entire Hebrew Bible. By Torah I mean all of Jewish learning, sacred and secular, in every genre, from the ancient dusty past to the roiling raucous pregnant present. And ultimately by Torah I mean: the Torah of our lives.

By Told I mean: in words, I mean in stories, stories spoken and stories written down, as well as stories illustrated, stories danced to, and stories shared as song.

By Different I mean: not the same. By different I mean that I don’t believe that there was a real Moses or a revelation at Sinai, but when I close my eyes I can still see where I was standing: to the southwest of the mountain, which was really just a low rise, a hillock. I can see what I was wearing, sandals and a long dusty brown robe, hanging loosely over my near-term first child. I can still see the people who were standing around me, husband, friends, family, all of us listening to a short dark hairy man with a heavy lisp talking and talking and talking as if his very life depended on it, as if ours did, and does still, to this very day.

Lydia of Tiberias said in the name of Judith the Wise:

Moses told stories from the top of a mountain. Miriam told stories while kneading bread. The Levites wrote down his words. Her attendants were too busy stoking the fires beneath the ovens to write anything down. But whenever we bless our bread and eat it, we are eating her stories.

The Damascus Talmud, Tractate “Blessings”

The rabbis of old divided their commentaries on the Torah into two categories, Halachah, which are legal ponderings, and Aggadah, which are narrative explorations. In the Orthodox world it’s Halachah, Jewish law, that determines who is Jewish and what is Jewish. But I am not that kind of Jew. I’m grounded in that ancient rabbinic soil in a different way. I’m an Aggadic Jew, and you perhaps are too. It’s stories, narratives, words, intonations, feelings, dreams, gossip, and even recipes that name us, label us—the passing on of recipes a fundamental form of storytelling. So imagine us sitting around a table, we Aggadic Jews who are every bit as Jewish as the Halachic ones. Imagine us sitting around a table, eating blintzes or falafels or rotis, or all three of them, as we tell each other the stories, the Torah, of our lives.

The three sections of the Hebrew Bible—Torah, Prophets, and Writings—were first spoken and then written down and edited during the period of the First and Second Temples, and canonized after the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. But I am a man who sees differently out of each eye. I am a man who lives in the world twice, and in this book you will find stories that are grounded in the texts that have come down to us through time, and you will find a second set of texts, which are grounded in alternate history.

In the real world our ancestors built two temples in Jerusalem. The first was erected by King Solomon in the mid-tenth century BCE and destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. The second was begun under the Persians in 538 BCE and destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 CE. In this book you will discover that our ancestors built a third Temple, which was begun in 363 CE under the Roman emperor Julian—who actually proposed doing so, but died too soon for it to be accomplished. You will learn too that a convocation was held in Jerusalem in the year 404, soon after that temple was completed, whose members canonized the fourth and final section of the Hebrew Bible, “Zichronot, Remembrances,” under the leadership of the first woman to have been ordained a rabbi, Judith the Wise. When the Third Temple was destroyed in 537 CE, after the Final Jewish Revolt, the Romans forced the survivors of the land to completely level the city of Jerusalem and then entirely rebuild it, so that to this day no one knows where our three ancient temples stood. In 588, when a shining new city rose up from vanished hills and valleys, the Romans forced every last one of the surviving Jews into permanent exile. Luckily, the large Jewish communities in Syria, Egypt, and Italy received the fleeing refugees into their flourishing communities, their synagogues and schools, and of course into their stories.

Salome the daughter of Leah said:

To the Torah of Moses the books of the Prophets were added, by the men of the Great Assembly of Jerusalem. To the books of the Prophets the Writings were added, by the men of the Solemn Assembly of Yavneh. To the Writings the books of Remembrances were added, by the women and men of the Glorious Assembly of Jerusalem, in the days when the final temple was still standing.

One God and four letters in God’s holy name. One holy world, and four directions. One Holy Scripture in four sections.

The Roman Talmud, Tractate “Wonder”

In the “real world” there are two Talmuds, Babylonian and Jerusalem, that were written entirely by men, in Aramaic, with a focus that is largely Halachic. But in the pages that follow you will discover a world in which there are three entirely different Talmuds that are largely Aggadic, their texts written by men and women on three different continents, in three different cities: Damascus, Alexandria, and Rome, in three different languages: Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. You won’t hear the stories of how they were created, nor will you hear stories about how three different strands of Aggadic Judaism evolved from those three Talmuds. But gradually, as you read this book—you may begin to hear those stories echoing in your mind, as if I’d written them, texted them to you, as if you’d read them, scrolled through them, and lived them yourself.

All of this may sound unlikely to you, absurd, ridiculous, impossible. But we know from the archaeological record that in the third century CE a woman named Rufina of Smyrna was the head of her synagogue, as were Sophia of Gortyn and Theopempte of Myndos a century later, at the very same time that the Talmudic rabbis were recording their legal decisions—without ever mentioning those women or the others like them who had leadership roles in their communities and in their congregations. So consider the possibility that my ‘imaginary’ past isn’t entirely made up, but summoned from beyond the grave the way that the so-called Witch of Endor brought back from the dead the prophet Samuel in the book of Kings.

Julia Rachel the daughter of Miriam the Younger said:

On the day that the Torah was gi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Twice Upon a Time
• Chapter 2: A Torah of Our Foremothers
• Chapter 3: Verses from the Scrolls of “Zichronot”
• Chapter 4: The Five Books of Motion
• Chapter 5: The Secret Stories of Rosanna Ramer
• Chapter 6: Riffing on Torah
• Afterword
• Notes
• Acknowledgements