Fuck Yeah Torah Portion

I hate Maya Angelou.

Okay, hate is probably a strong word, but I lost faith in her sometime back in my youth when I saw this performance on Sesame Street. I appreciate the message that we should take pride in who we are, but how dare the former Marguerite Anne Johnson sing a song about how proud she is that her name is Maya and she’s not going to change it. She already changed it! If this was a Sesame Street lesson in irony, then fine, but instead it came across to me as a lesson in hypocrisy. Names are important. There’s nothing wrong with changing one’s name, and in fact, that can be an incredibly important and powerful way of affirming identity. Marguerite-cum-Maya should understand that better than most. I’d argue the Torah understands that even better.

This week’s Torah Portion (Lech L’cha) has the Bible’s first major name-change, when the geriatric Abram and Sarai become Abraham and Sarah. I think we tend to forget how far into their story this name change happens. Before re-reading the parasha this week, I had it in my head that they change their names when they set out from Ur to Canaan. Not so. They’ve both had quite a few of their adventures — particularly their failures — before they get their new names.

Regrets? They had a few. Abram lies about his relationship with Sarai to try to save his neck in Egypt, only to have the mess blow up in his face. Sarai more or less forces her handmaiden Hagar on her husband to produce an heir, and then gets all fatal attraction on her once baby Ishmael is born. And let’s not forget Abram’s inability to live peacefully with his nephew Lot. (When Lot and Abram parted ways, Lot ended up as a POW before landing in Sodom, which didn’t work out so great for him either.)

But they also learned from their mistakes and grew as individuals. Abram redeemed Lot from captivity during that POW incident, and helped make peace among the warring factions. And I’m sure Sarai did as well, but one of the inadequacies of ancient texts is the way they sometimes just forget to tell us about what’s going on with the women.

Regardless, we’re told that the addition of the Hebrew letter ה to their names signifies their closer connection to God. Their new names reflected their new identities, their new way of understanding themselves and their new way of interacting with their communities and the rest of the world.

We see this elsewhere in the Bible - Jacob becomes Israel, Naomi becomes Mara, etc. But it works differently in different cases. If you talk to most people, including those who are really familiar with the Book of Ruth, about “Mara,” you’ll likely be met with blank stares. And while there are times when we refer to Jacob as Israel in our liturgy and popular understanding, it’s rare. In most cases, to most of us, when we think of that person, we call him Jacob.

So what makes me yell Fuck Yeah! about this portion? I love that the Bible allows for multiple ways of understanding names and changing identities. New names can be permanent, so much so that we (intentionally or not) read them back onto the history that happened prior to those names. But sometimes new names reflect one aspect of ourselves, and serve a purpose sometimes without canceling or negating our other names. That’s okay too.

I often think about the Bible as a pre-modern post-modern document. For a text that’s thousand of years old, it’s pretty adept as holding both “n and not-n” ideas simultaneously. For some, that can be confounding or upsetting, but personally, I find that empowering. Fuck yeah.

I know, I know, it’s standard practice to discuss the Torah portion we’re going to read this coming Saturday, not the one we just read this past Saturday. But my computer is broken and none of the other team members have stepped up yet, so for now we’re more reflective than proactive. But as we learned last week, reflective practice is a good thing. See what I did there?

Anyway, this week we get Noah, of Ark fame. The best part of Noah is, naturally, the part that you probably don’t know if you’re only familiar with the kiddie version of the story. You see, after Noah and his family saves all the fauna of the earth from destruction in the flood, the story continues.

Having survived Armageddon and the loss of everyone he’s ever known outside his nuclear family, Noah can’t exactly go to Disneyland, since it hasn’t been built yet. So just as football players celebrated their wins prior to 1987, Noah celebrated by getting shit-faced (Genesis 9:21).

Let’s be fair. “Celebrate” probably isn’t the right word there. Noah was drowning his sorrows. It’s tempting to read this as a character flaw, but I don’t think that’s fair. Noah was likely suffering from some pretty serious PTSD. Noah’s episode ends badly when he exposes himself to his kids and hilarity ensues one makes fun of him, earning a curse for his line of offspring. But the end of the episode isn’t why I think this is awesome.

Noah was chosen to be the survivor because he was the most righteous man of his generation (Genesis 6:9). We don’t get any real examples of what made him righteous. In fact, we don’t get a whole lot of anything that might give us a sense of who Noah was as a person… until this episode.

My take away from this is that the most righteous person in that generation still had struggles. Whether you understand his drinking as a character flaw or a disability (and I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m making an equivalency there), the Torah is asserting pretty aggressively that being righteous, being blameless or saintly or whatever you want to translate that verse — being the person who walks with God is not exclusive of having struggles, or flaws, or disabilities.

When God decides to recreate the world, his do-over doesn’t begin with the creation of a new, “flawless” quintessential human. God instead picks a solid guy who tries his best with the hand he’s dealt. That’s what righteousness means. That’s what it means to walk with God. And that, mythological speaking, is the stock from which we’re all supposed to have descended.

What I love about the creation story — that Sarah sort of hints at here but doesn’t address head-on — is the way reflective practice is built into the act of creation. God doesn’t just create light; God stops and considers the creation and deems it good. And so on.

Jewish tradition teaches us that one of the ways we’re supposed to figure out how to act is by seeing what God does and acting accordingly. I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to pick and choose, e.g. we don’t test our friends by asking them to do ridiculous things like kill their kids only to say “J/K!” at the last minute, but we do rest every seven days.

Anyway, God does work and then pauses to reflect on that work, which is distinct from pausing to rest from that work. Both kinds of pauses are important; so important, that they are among the first things the Torah teaches. Fuck yeah.