Dreaming Covenant

The portion Lekh-Lekha is full of visions, dreams, and experiences outside of simple space-time:

va’-yeira YHVH el-Avram [וַיֵּרָא יְהֹוָה אֶל־אַבְרָם] (YHVH is seen by Abraham — Gen 12:7);
sa na einekha u’r’eih min-hamakom asher attah [שָׂא נָא עֵינֶיךָ וּרְאֵה מִן־הַמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר־אַתָּה] (“lift your eyes from the place where you are” — Gen 13:14);
dvar-YHVH [דְבַר־יְהֹוָה] (a word/matter of YHVH — Gen 15:1);
ba-machazeh [בַּמַּחֲזֶה] (in a vision — Gen 15:1);
va-yotzei oto hachutzah [וַיּוֹצֵא אֹתוֹ הַחוּצָה] ([God] brought him outside — Gen 15:5);
tardemah [תַרְדֵּמָה] (deep slumber/trance — Gen 15:12);
yado’ teida’ [יָדֹעַ תֵּדַע] (know deeply — Gen 15:13).

Throughout their relationship, Abraham and God are linked by the verbs “reish-alef-hey” [see, appear, learn; e.g., Gen 18:1-2] and yud-dalet-ayin [to know, learn, experience intimately; e.g., Gen 18:19). The portion begins with God calling to Abraham (Gen 12:1) and closes with God “going up from” him (Gen 17:22). In between, space and time dilate and contract, and covenantal hopes unfold in which Abraham represents both dreamer and dream. (See also Dreamer and Dream.)

Dream and Dread, Vision and Trust

Two expressions — ba-machazeh and tardemah — in the passage sometimes called “Covenant of the Pieces” (Gen 15) were a focus for Tzedek Chicago Torah study [5785].

The vision root chet-zayin-hey, used in Gen 15:1 [בַּמַּחֲזֶה, ba-machazeh], is uncommon in the Torah but appears more often later in the Tanakh, especially in Psalms, Prophets, and Job. In Job 4, “visions of the night” [מֵחֶזְיֹנוֹת לָיְלָה ] are linked with fear and fright, trembling and quaking — other concepts found in Abraham’s experience and with the expression tardemah (Job 4:13-14).

The unusual word tardemah [תַרְדֵּמָה] is translated as “deep sleep,” “trance,” or “profound slumber.” This is the same state in which ha-adam’s tzela [side, rib] is removed in Gen 2:21, leading Rabbi Brant Rosen to suggest tardemah as “divine anesthetic.” Brant also emphasized the dream and dread qualities of this experience as well as the time- and space-confusion of the intertwined promises of exile/estrangement and homecoming, with “home” still unidentified.

Abraham’s response to all this is emunah: v’he-emin ba-YHVH [וְהֶאֱמִן בַּיהֹוָה] — he trusted in God’s promise. Sometimes translated as “believed,” emunah can also mean “trust,” “have faith in,” or “stand firm.”

…The same three root letters — alef-mem-nun — of emunah also form the word amon [אוֹמֵן]: artist, master crafter, architect; tutor or nursemaid. It is linked in Midrash Rabbah with Moses as “nursing parent” in Numbers 11:12. More on this here (link coming soon)….

God “reckons this [Abraham’s emunah] to his merit” — in other words, Brant suggested, God sees Abraham as “an all-right guy, going along with the plan” (Gen 15:6). …which strikes me as very like the start of a buddies-on-the-road movie: I mean, Thelma and Louise agree to vacation together, but how well do they really know one another before that road trip starts? Certainly their commitment to one another grows as the story progresses (MGM, 1991), a common trope for such tales. Some teachers suggest a similar progression for development of the covenant between God, Abraham’s folks, humanity in general, and the earth.

Dreamer and Dream, Artist and Art

The word “covenant / berit [בְּרִית]” is translated into Aramaic as kayama, from the root kuf-vav-mem, to rise or to establish (קְיָמִי in Targum for Gen 17:7, e.g.). Leo Baeck (1873-1956) argues that what is thus “established” is enduring. But covenant, in his view, seems far from static, and his description, “written in dark times,” seems worth considering in these dark times.

Baeck writes that “covenant,” a legal concept of the ancient world, developed a “revolutionary meaning” in the Tanakh:

“In the Bible, the word is elemental, alive, filled with a germinating and unfolding meaning…. one of those words in which the idea of the great inter-relatedness, the great unity of all, of mystery and ordered certainty, seeks to express itself…. It is the expression of that which is to endure because God has made it part of the beings and forms which [God] has created, the condition for their unity and interrelatedness, the prerequisite for reality itself…. [The Targum] translated berit as kayama, the established, the firmly founded, the enduring, the existing, indicating that which is above all change, above all that comes and goes” — Baeck, 1955 (pages 11-12 of English edition, 1964)

Gunther Plaut (1912-2012, z”l) also understands covenant in an evolving way, in relation to Abraham’s experience:

“…Abraham was indeed impelled by a voice he identified as the voice of God. We stand face to face with ‘internal’ history. Abraham acted on his comprehension of the Divine, and his descendants appropriated his experience and made it their own.

“…It is through him that God’s promise is made known to us; it is through his eyes that the reality of the covenant must be viewed…. These experiences of Abraham were the foundation on which his descendants built their house of faith and contributed their commitment to a covenant first envisioned in the dark of ancient Negev nights.” — Plaut‘s commentary on Genesis 12, 15-16

This experience of internal history, shared by individuals and communities, is often discussed in Tzedek Chicago Torah study (as in other Torah-studying collectives). We are simultaneously trying to understand the story while living it and shaping it, as we grapple with God, with the text, and with others who trust in their own, often hugely conflicting, understandings of promise and covenant.

Dreaming Justice

During discussion, we considered how the imagery of fire and smoke evoked other periods of Jewish history as well as current events. (For some context: this was Nov 9, 2024.*) Having few of my own words, I shared some that I return to again and again from Alicia Suskin Ostriker, from the closing to “Job, or a Meditation on Justice.”

Full citation: “Job, or a Meditation on Justice,” from Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1994. An earlier version, “Job, Or the Imagining of Justice,” appeared in The Iowa Review in 1986 — see Academia.edu. I only read the final two paragraphs of the piece during our discussion. Sharing here a slightly longer excerpt.

“Job, or a Meditation on Justice (PDF excerpt).”

Note that the perspective is of Job’s wife, and more generally, “the woman of whom we are portions.” I could not be more grateful for these powerful words — which captured what I thought needed to be said on this past Shabbat Lekh Lekha 5785* — and I know they spoke to others during Torah study as well. Still, I find myself very conscious of the binaries in our language and thinking in those days, which I hope we are learning to transform.

*Mentioning the timing twice in this short section to avoid confusion later — which might be a week or two hence or farther into a future facilitated by internet archiving. (Writing that something happened “on Wednesday” or that a situation was evolving “last Spring,” without specifying which of the many Wednesdays or springtimes in history might be meant, fosters unnecessary confusion.)

NOTES

Leo Baeck

Leo Baeck, This People Israel

Quotation above from This People Israel, The Meaning of Jewish Existence. First published in German, 1955. English, by Albert H. Friedlander, published by UAHC, 1964. Appears to be out of print, but can be found at Archive.org as well as in used copies and libraries.

According to the author’s preface, this book was “written in dark times,” begun “in the writer’s old house” and continued while he was in a concentration camp. More about his life and work.

From the conclusion to This People Israel:

“One word has dared to be the one expression for that which keeps everything together: ‘covenant’ — ‘the enduring,’ the covenant of the One God. It is the covenant of God with the universe, and therefore with the earth; the covenant of God with humanity and therefore with this people contained in it; the covenant with history and therefore with every one within it; the covenant with the fathers and therefore with the children; the covenant with days which were and therefore with days which are to come.

“…The question of all questions, that of the entrance of the eternal, the unending, the one, into the domain of the many, the terrestrial, the passing, this question in which the searching, the thinking, the hope of this people has always lived, in which it once grew and in which is was ever reborn — this question itself possesses the answer: ‘As true as My covenant is’ [Jer 33:25, cited more fully, earlier in the book]” — p.402-403

W. Gunther Plaut

Plaut Commentary

W. Gunther Plaut, z”l, was a scholar, congregational rabbi, and leader in the Reform movement in the U.S. and Canada. He produced commentary on four of the five books of Torah, incorporated into The Torah: A Modern Commentary, which he edited. The publication was ground-breaking when new and is still standard for Reform and other readers. The edition cited here is UAHC, 1981. (Union of American Hebrew Congregations is now Union for Reform Judaism). Cited above are p.93 and p.103.

NOTE: Plaut’s commentary is no haven for non-zionist readers. Still, it was a remarkable publication in its time, is an amazing collection of his own and others’ scholarship, and continues to offer a great deal, much of which, I confess, I’ve only recently come to appreciate. His commentary was a huge deal when new. It brought full Torah text into Reform settings, back when the Union for Reform Judaism was still known as the UAHC (Union of American Hebrew Congregations) and services were substantially in English; in fact, it was the first non-orthodox, full Torah commentary in English, and it was the first to include critical scholarship in a volume meant for worship settings.

Rereading Torah Towards Liberation