adam and eve – Sim Lev

In Judaism, night comes before day. The day begins when the sun sets and the first stars appear in the sky.

This has been the way of the world since its mythic origins.

In the beginning, there was endless darkness. Then God said “let there be light.” And there was light.

And God separated the light from the darkness. The first distinction. And the darkness God called night, and the brightness God called day.

And there was evening, and there was morning. A first day.

Having created nights and days, God populated them with matter. At the end of each period of creation, there was evening, then there was morning. Each day.

During the sixth day, God created human beings and placed them in a garden. Then there was evening.

The first human beings had never seen an evening before. They did not know that the sun could set. They did not know the difference between night and day.

What must it have been like for the first sentient beings to realise who they were and who their Creator was, only to see the sun disappear? How frightened they must have been!

Perhaps they called out to God and asked for guidance. But that evening marked the beginning of the seventh day, and God was resting. God did not answer them.

Our Talmud teaches that when the first human beings saw their first nightfall, they fell into despair. Adam feared that the sun had disappeared as punishment for his sin. He worried that the world would now return to the endless darkness with which it began.

Eve cried. She fasted and prayed. Adam and Eve wrapped their arms around each other and held their bodies close as they prepared for the end.

Then the dawn broke.

And they realised: this is the way of the world.

The world began in autumn, at the festival of Rosh Hashanah.

When the first winter nights crept in, and they saw the length of days decreasing, they panicked once more. Now in exile from Eden, they had no way of knowing what would come next.

Again, they fasted, wept, and prayed.

Then the spring came, and brought with it longer days.

And they realised: this is the way of the world.

We begin with darkness. Light follows.

There is evening. Then the dawn comes.

There is winter. And it always becomes spring.

This is the way of the world.

We can observe this dialectic in almost all matters of life. Our suffering is followed by joy. Our struggles are replaced by triumphs.

Some days feel like endless nights, but the dawn is always waiting for those who are patient for it. So we hold each other close and wait for the sun to rise.

This is the way of the world.

These trends appear, too, in history. There will be periods of decline followed by ages of plenty. There will be economic busts, and there will be booms. There will be war, but peace will come.

This is the way of the world.

But human history is different from all other natural rules. The order of night and day and the structure of the seasons was predetermined before we arrived on this earth.

History, on the other hand, is made by human beings. History is the one area of life where we can, collectively, choose what happens. Our actions determine whether we live in the winter of war or bountiful springtime.

So, it is incumbent upon us not just to hold each other and wait for morning, but to drag the sun over the horizon and demand that day appears.

In 1969, “Shir LaShalom,” became the anthem of the Israeli peace movement. In the final stanza of the song, we sing out: “Do not say the day will come. Bring on the day.”

Just as people make the active decision to go to war, peace is also a choice. Those who want an end to war cannot just wait in the darkness.

We sang Shir LaShalom in this sanctuary on Simchat Torah. I felt, and I think many of you did too, truly jubilant at the news of ceasefire and hostage release. After two years, we could finally see a possible end to the suffering.

My jubilation was tinged with pain as I remembered the last time that Shir LaShalom was chanted throughout synagogues.

That was in 1995. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat had shaken hands on the lawn of the White House. They had agreed to the Oslo Accords.

While already imperfect and tentative, the Oslo Accords of three decades ago were the last major effort at a comprehensive peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. They paved the way for mutual recognition and the possibility of two states.

High on the dream of peace, Rabin joined Peace Now protesters in Tel Aviv Square and sang along to Shir LaShalom. With the lyrics still in his breast pocket, Rabin headed to the car park. There, a far right fundamentalist waited for the Prime Minister, and shot him dead.

There is still a copy of Shir LaShalom, stained with Rabin’s blood. There are those words, covered in the blood of a man who tried to make peace: do not say the day will come, bring on the day.

Yes, we must indeed bring on the day. But there are some who want to return us to endless night.

An Israeli fanatic shot dead Rabin to stop his day from dawning.

When Hamas saw the prospect of the Oslo Accords creating two states, they launched suicide bombing attacks on public transport. They took control of Gaza and promised endless war.

The Israeli far right wrested control over the offices of government. They promised there would be no Palestinian state and that every effort to achieve one would be swiftly repressed.

It saddens me that, even in the brief interludes since Rabin’s assassination when Netanyahu’s party has not had control over the legislature, few Israeli politicians have attempted to break from their logic of violence and occupation as the only answer to the Palestinian national question.

Daybreak always comes, but there are those who prolong the darkness, and we have been living through a terribly long night. The call to bring on the day from earlier generations has been eclipsed by militarism and fear.

We have endless war. This is the way of the world.

But this is the way of the world as some have chosen to make it. And we can make the world another way.

On Monday, we saw the first thing in a long while that looked like a sun beam.

We celebrated the hostages coming home and an end to the bombing of Gaza. It was the first reminder we have had in a long time that peace is possible, and war is a choice.

We are able to bring on the day.

Now we must create even more sunshine.

But we have become so accustomed to darkness that the dawn may even be painful.

In daylight, we will have to look hard at the choices that made this war so prolonged and destructive. We will likely see that peace was possible much earlier and that more hostages might have come back alive sooner. We may ask searching questions about the morality of this war.

In the light of day, we will have to look hard at what Israel has become, and what the spiritual state of our Jewish institutions now is.

But we must bring on the day. We cannot return to the long-lasting night of war, murder, zealotry, and extremism. We cannot let anything that happened in the last two years ever happen again.

Throughout this dark night, our Progressive Jewish counterparts in the Israeli Reform Movement have been pushing hard for serious change.

They have been protesting outside Netanyahu’s house every Saturday evening. They have been joining Palestinian olive farmers in the West Bank to protect them from settlers. They have been demanding a real overhaul of the deep, structural causes of this century-long conflict.

My month with Rabbis for Human Rights before I began here helped positively frame my rabbinate. Although the picture on the ground is bleak, it made me realise just how many people are desperately trying to create daylight in the darkest contexts.

I hope that we will not fall into complacency now because the hostages are home. The task of peace building is more pressing than ever.

I want us to draw ever closer to those who are defending human rights and trying to bring about a future based on dignity and equality. I hope that, next year, we can bring a full delegation of Progressive Jews to support the West Bank olive harvest. I hope this can be a moment where we truly embrace the cause of peace.

This is not the seventh evening of creation. It is not the time to rest. We cannot leave our colleagues alone in this struggle now.

This is the first dawn of a new morning.

It is an opportunity for real accountability. It is a chance for meaningful peace building. It is the first crack of sunshine, and we have to drag out every possible ray of light to join it.

We must wrest the light into the darkness.

We cannot say the day will come.

We must bring on the day.

The story of creation is probably the most well-known and most misunderstood of our Torah. Full of powerful imagery, t he Talmud says that it is forbidden to study the text alone because it is too easy to misunderstand.[1] Because it is so close to the High Holy Days, many Jews miss this reading in our liturgical cycle, having been exhausted by the great process of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah, all festivals crammed together into a very short period of time.

The danger of Jews not hearing these texts and of religious leaders not teaching them is that people go away believing that the version we pick up from our surrounding culture is the only version of events. The story of Adam and Eve, in particular, has such currency in that all of us have likely imbibed a version of their story. We have seen paintings in art galleries of European-looking men and women covered with fig leaves. We have heard the stories told in different ways through popular culture.

The story we are accustomed to is one of binary gender. God made a man on the seventh day of creation. God then made the first woman out of Adam’s rib. They are a model of the natural male-female binary in the world and an example of the heterosexual monogamy God has intended for all of us. I am not going to question whether that is a legitimate or authentic tradition. None of us can say we speak with divine authority, so we have to be able to live with different and contradictory interpretations. What I do want to do is offer up an alternative version of the story of Adam and Eve: a Jewish, rabbinic, midrashic version of the story.

I’m sure it goes without saying that, in the progressive Jewish tradition, these stories are considered metaphors. The question is, however, metaphors for what? The stories we tell are important. If we tell stories, even metaphorical ones, of gender as fundamentally binary, and the natural order as fundamentally patriarchal, then we give credence to that worldview. We betray our feminist values and exclude our congregants who don’t fit into that binary. The rabbinic version of the Bereishit story does not only go against the grain of that perspective, but fundamentally overturns it.

First of all, it is not clear from our story that Adam was the first man. The word “adam”, as it is used in Genesis 1, acts as a noun, not a name. It speaks about a person, a human being. The word shares a root with “adamah”, meaning earth or clay. Adam, therefore, might best be translated as “earthling”.

Nor is it clear that Eve was the first woman, or that she was created from Adam’s rib. The biblical telling of her creation is somewhat inconsistent. In the first version of the story, in Genesis 1, a man and a woman are created at the same time. In the second version, in Genesis 2, Eve is created from Adam’s rib. The rabbis picked up on this strange disjunction. They also noticed that in the second version, when Adam meets Eve, he says “this one at last is the bone of my bones and the flesh of my flesh.” That word “at last”, in the Hebrew is “pa’am”[2], which could mean “this time around.” Our sages inferred therefore that the two stories tell of different relationships: the first of one between equals; the second of one with a dominant man and subordinate woman.

So, first, what was this relationship between equals? The rabbis suggest that man and woman were not just made at the same time. They were, in fact, the same person. The original human being, according to their midrash, had one body, two sets of genitalia and two faces.[3] Professor of Talmud, Daniel Boyarin, calls this person “the primordial androgyne.” Rather than binary gender being the model of original humanity, the first person is intersex.[4]

What then happened to this original intersex person? According to another midrash, they were split into two: Adam and Lilith. Notice that Lilith is not cut from Adam but that both are cut from each other: our original progenitors are equals.

The Ballad of Ben Sira, a medieval religious text that combines previous mythical traditions, tells the story this way:

“When the first man, Adam, saw that he was alone, God made for him a woman like himself, from the earth. God called her name Lilith, and brought her to Adam. They immediately began to quarrel. Adam said: “You lie beneath me.” And Lilith said: “You lie beneath me! We are both equal, for both of us are from the earth.” And they would not listen to one another.As soon as Lilith saw this, she uttered the Divine name and flew up into the air and fled.”[5]

What follows is a high-speed chase across the world involving angels and monsters. Ultimately, Lilith fights against Adam, the patriarchy and even God to become liberated. Undeniably, some tellings of this story are misogynistic, painting Lilith as a demon and a baby-killer, but the fact remains that a crucial part of the Jewish tradition is the story of an empowered woman who refuses to be subordinated. Our model of gendered relationships is a complicated mess of power struggles and queer subversion. It is, really, much closer to the relationships people really have.

The rabbinic tradition on creation tells us stories about intersex people, gender confusion, and resistance to patriarchy. Right now, the telling of those stories matters greatly. The government is debating an update to the Gender Recognition Act. When it was first passed in 2004, this act was a great sign of progress. It enabled trans people to legally change their gender on some certificates. As it stands, however, that process is highly medicalised and expensive. The new legislation would enable trans people to ensure that their gender is reflected on their birth certificates without having to jump through great hoops.[6]

This might seem like simply a bureaucratic change, but it has invoked great ire across the political spectrum. Underpinning much of the backlash is the idea that gender is both binary and innate. For the ideological opponents of the upgrade to the Gender Recognition Act, a gender cannot be changed. Much of their discourse has been quite hateful and aggressive. Transphobic abuse has become exceptionally loud, especially online.

What we can say in response to this is: in our religious tradition, binary gender is deeply disputed. In rabbinic Judaism, the first person was intersex, and transitioned from being one intersex person into two people: men and women. In our religious tradition, gender is complicated and malleable. Perhaps, armed with Jewish understandings of human nature, we may be able to push back against some of this hate.

Shabbat shalom.

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I gave this sermon on Saturday 6th October at Manchester Liberal Jewish Community. A congregant helped correct some of my understanding of the GRA. If you would like to speak out in support of the GRA, you can respond to the consultation using Stonewall’s resources.

[1] Hagigah 11b

[2] Gen 2:23

[3] Leviticus Rabbah on Genesis 2

[4] Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel

[5] https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/lilith-lady-flying-in-darkness/

[6] https://lgbt.foundation/gra