Every book has a founding story. like the Bible itself, this volume originated on a mountaintop, though without the pomp, fire, and cloud of Mount Sinai. In slightly less theatrical surrounds, it was born amid the snow-tipped Wasatch Mountain range outside Park City, Utah.
The Reboot network has met there every year since 2002, bringing together an eclectic mix of characters to discuss how generational changes in technology, community, and meaning have transformed American Jewish identity. Over the years, the conversation has catalyzed the creation of more than a hundred varied projects and programs. This book is one such product—the outcome of a discussion that began in 2011, when Damon Lindelof invited the group to consider the Genesis tale of Abraham’s binding of Isaac.
In a room full of talkative writers, technologists, and social activists, the perplexing story of a father willing to sacrifice his son to prove the depth of his belief was like conversational catnip. An animated discussion encompassing godly commands, false prophecy, dodgy parenting, blind faith, and human justice ensued.
The conversation forced the group to confront a number of questions, most glaringly, how long it had been since they had last read a biblical text. The majority had stumbled through the Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Prophet, or Siddhartha in their college years, but if they retained any sense of the Bible, it was typically a vague memory, forged in youth, of crudely constructed, sanitized tales badly told—a stark contrast to the nuanced narrative they now grappled with together. A second session was scheduled to explore the story of the Tower of Babel. One on Moses and the burning bush quickly followed.
And so the idea for Unscrolled was born: an experiment to see what questions and ideas would emerge if fifty-four game individuals each wrestled with a single section of the Torah—the first five books of the Bible—from the rollicking, human stories of Genesis, to the nation building of Exodus; the blood, organs, and ritual sacrifices of Leviticus; the confusion of Numbers; and the dramatic climax of Deuteronomy.
The idea is far from original. The Torah is typically read in fifty-four sections in synagogues around the world over the course of a lunisolar year. Each public reading, chanted aloud, is traditionally accompanied by a Dvar Torah (literally a “word of Torah”) in which a member of the congregation steps up to deliver a personal interpretation of the story. This riff can focus on anything, from a single word or detail, to an overarching examination of character or the entire story line.
Consider this, then, as a book of unorthodox Divrei Torah, offered up in the spirit of the rabbinical assertion that there are infinite interpretations of the Torah and that everyone who stood at Mount Sinai saw a “different face” of the text.
A word on the book’s format: Each chapter contains a synopsis of the biblical section, including the particular verse that inspired the contributor’s interpretation that follows. The synopsis is faithful to the biblical text. If you find your blood boiling because the number of Israelite men leaving Egypt is recorded along with a reference to the children and cattle who accompanied them, yet women are not mentioned, that is the original text talking.
Know also that although we are eternally indebted to each contributor and the spirit of creative adventure he or she brought to the project, the reaction triggered by the text and interpretation—be it enjoyment, frustration, amusement, or anger—is the point. Our highest hope is that this volume will cause you to follow this biblical text along with us throughout the year and wrestle with the narrative to come to your own conclusions—a ritual that has been faithfully followed for more than three thousand years.
Roger BennettNew York
[email protected]
A dizzying race from the story of creation through the tales of the Patriarchs—Abraham! Isaac! Jacob!—Genesis is a crushed cluster of classic biblical stories served up at nosebleed pace.
The narrative charges through the primeval story, Adam and Eve, and Noah and the flood before lingering on the covenant-entwined life of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (with all-too-fleeting mention of matriarchs Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel).
In arguably the Torah’s most complete book, the characters are humanly portrayed and the stories well crafted. Ranging in emotion from the horror of Isaac’s binding, to the suffering of Lot, the romance of Rebekah, and the soap-operatic tale of Jacob’s rise to power, the tales never lose their narrative thread, leaving a reader eager to move from cliffhanger to cliff-hanger.
Josh RadnorB’reishit (“In the beginning”) Genesis 1:1–6:8
Aimee BenderNoah (“Noah”) Genesis 6:9–11:32
Jill SolowayLekh L’kha (“Go”) Genesis 12:1–17:27
Damon LindelofVayeara (“And he appeared”) Genesis 18:1–22:24
Rebecca DanaHayyei Sarah (“The life of Sarah”) Genesis 23:1–25:18
Joshua FoerTol’dot (“Generations”) Genesis 25:19–28:9
Adam MansbachVa-yetzei (“And he left”) Genesis 28:10–32:3
Michaela WatkinsVa-yishlah (“And he sent”) Genesis 32:4–36:43
David AuburnVa-yeishev (“And he dwelt”) Genesis 37:1–40:23
Todd RosenbergMi-ketz (“At the end”) Genesis 41:1–44:17
Saki KnafoVa-yiggash (“Then he drew near”) Genesis 44:18–47:27
Dennis BermanVa-y’hi (“And he lived”) Genesis 47:28–50:26
“God knows as soon as you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know good and bad.” —Genesis 3:5
B’REISHIT (“In the beginning”)
Genesis 1:1–6:8
In the beginning: God creates heaven and earth, light and darkness, day and night, and then pro- ceeds to embellish the project on a daily basis. The land is separated from water to establish earth and sea. Then trees, fruit, and other plants are crafted. The stars are next to be added, along with the sun and moon.
The waters are packed with sea creatures, the land with wildlife, and the sky with birds, all of which will reproduce.
Then comes the big one. God creates humanity—both male and female are a reflection of the creator’s image—blessing them with the mandate to become fertile masters of the world, in control of every other living creature.
To cap this week of stunning productivity, God blesses the seventh day, declares it holy, downs the tools, and stops work.
A more detailed retelling of the creation of the human race is now provided. The male prototype is crafted from the dust on the ground. God breathes life into his soul by blowing into his nostrils, causing man to snap to attention.
God selects the garden of Eden as man’s habitat—a paradise containing all the food anyone could eat. A tree of life sprouts in the center, alongside the tree of good and bad knowledge. God inserts man into this setting with simple instructions: “Help yourself to anything, but whatever you do, don’t eat from the tree of knowledge—it will kill you.”
While man goes about the time-consuming task of naming every animal, God realizes it is not a good idea for him to be alone. After putting man to sleep, God extracts a rib and fashions it into woman, a name man creates. Both are stark naked, but their nudity does not bother them in the slightest.
A canny serpent soon manages to persuade woman to consider eating from the tree of knowledge. The snake’s key point is that knowing everything will elevate humans to God’s level. With her interest piqued, woman proceeds to eat from the tree, feeding her husband, too. As soon as they have eaten, they look down, realize they are naked, and experience a sudden burst of shame. Fig leaves are quickly fashioned into loincloths, and they are nude no more.
When they hear God approaching, both man and woman attempt to hide. God calls out to man, who admits he is hiding because he is embarrassed by his naked state. God shrewdly inquires if this sudden self-consciousness is a sign that man and woman have eaten from the forbidden tree of knowledge. Man confesses that he ate, but only because woman urged him to do so. Woman passes the buck on to the serpent, claiming it seduced her.
God’s punishment is immediate. The serpent can now move only by crawling on its belly. Woman is condemned to suffer the intense pain of childbirth, and man will now have to work the land to grow whatever they require to eat. Humans will also be mortal from now on. To make sure of this, God kicks the pair out of Eden so they will not be tempted to eat from the tree of life and names them: Adam and Eve.
Adam and Eve proceed to have two sons: Abel, a shepherd, and Cain, a farmer. The two make offerings to God. Cain uses his fruit. Abel gives up his best sheep. God favors the lamb offering, which upsets Cain so much that God is compelled to chide him. “Don’t be angry. You can do better,” God explains. “Good and bad are yours to choose, but sin is intoxicating, and it is up to you to resist it.”
The warning does Cain no good. The next thing we know, he has killed his brother in the field. When God inquires about Abel’s whereabouts and Cain plays dumb, replying, “I don’t know; am I my brother’s keeper?” God busts him. Once more punishment is dispensed instantaneously. From that day on, Cain will struggle to farm and will be forced to wander the world restlessly. A panicked Cain is concerned that other men will enforce vigilante justice to avenge his crime. God thoughtfully places “the mark of Cain” on his head to warn others that they should not touch him.
Cain takes a wife and proceeds to have a child, Enoch. He also builds a city and names it after his son. His descendants are listed, creating an impression of a world that is filling up with people over time. Adam and Eve also have another son, Seth. Several generations of his descendants are listed, along with their life spans, which are as long as 969 years. They culminate in Noah, who has three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth, all born when he is at the ripe old age of 500.
I believe in God. I try to feel the room before I blurt that out in conversation, but . . . it’s a feature of my personality and a fact of my life. I’ve long wanted to do away with ideology and the punishing male trickster deity of my youth and get to the heart of the heart of the matter. Who is God? Who are we? What are we doing here? And how can we do it with a little more grace and guidance? Healing my broken perceptions of the divine, hitting the “install update” button and awakening to a new vision of God—that’s what this prayer is for me.
REVISION
1 Lord, hear my prayer—
1 My mind is filled with falsehoods about You.
2 Today let me rewrite.
3 Give me the courage to delete the rotten first second third and hundredth drafts
4 That deny You,
5 That blame You,
6 That slander You.
7 It is time.
1 Guide me to write a different, better story.
2 Teach me the true meaning of the garden, the snake, the apple, and the fall.
3 Scrub from my mind the lazy oft-told tales of punishment, trickery, and abandonment.
4 Let me retire the ego’s clichés and distortions, O Lord, and bid farewell to the misconceived central character:
5 the psychopathic, jealous trickster,
6 the crude caricature of paternal retribution,
7 the off-planet deity watching over us impassively, folded-armed, while we rot and writhe, our cries falling on deaf God ears.
1 I declare this vision of God to be false, and I ask that any remnants of this lie be erased from the crevices of my consciousness.
1 Let me learn anew. Let not the guilting of grandparents lead me to fear and reject the guidance of the other:
2 The Sikh,
3 The Sufi,
4 The Shaman,
5 The Hindu,
6 The Buddhist,
7 The Christian,
8 The Gnostic,
9 The Kabbalist.
10 If it is wise and true
11 —If it bears Your cosmic fingerprints and the quiet perfection of Your voice—
12 I will listen.
1 Let me live with the compassion of Buddha and Quan Yin and Mother Mary,
2 Let me write with the sacred clarity of Rumi and Hafiz, Wordsworth and Blake.
3 Teach me to surrender like Mohammed and pray like David,
4 To be fiery like Rama and fierce like Jesus.
1 May I not fall into the deification of any man—for You alone are God—but may I let the example of their light guide my path.
1 When I am weeping like Arjuna on the inner battlefield, may beautiful blue Krishna—the divine charioteer—lift me up and remind me of the Truth:
1 I am That.
2 Thou are That. All this is That.
3 That alone Is and there is nothing else but That.
1 Let me remember the divine dance of the Mother-Father, always, lest I fall into the dog-eat-dog foolishness upon which so much cruelty and injustice is based.
1 (When the Father said, “Let there be light,” the Mother answered, “And there was light.”)
1 Erase the imprint of atheism from my mind, Lord.
2 And while You’re at it, please remove: guilt, shame, anxiety, depression, comparison, competition, vanity, arrogance, and sloth.
1 Let the false prophets and holy bullies turn inward.
2 May they recognize the battle is never outside themselves.
3 For You do not exist in the world of opposites.
1 The madness of this world is our own.
2 We created it, we perpetuated it.
3 You do not endorse it.
4 You are innocent.
5 We have created You in our image.
6 Forgive us.
1 How am I to know I am being heard?
2 Because I am speaking to myself.
1 You and I are not separate.
1 Heal the wound in my psyche that stubbornly claims otherwise,
2 For this is the ego’s well-constructed and persistent lie:
3 You are alone you are alone you are alone.
1 Like a train schedule blaring on a loudspeaker, it is repeated. Over and over.
2 Daring us to relent and believe that which is false.
1 The bite of that apple was terrible indeed.
2 It convinced us we were not You.
1 Let me bear the weight of the responsibility for these errors of thought, speech, action, and perception as I learn to walk the razor’s edge of virtue.
1 May I always hear the steady vigilance and unending love of Your voice guiding me home.
1 All else falls away.
2 Only that which is unchanging is True.
1 Thank You, Mother-Father God,
2 for this new beginning.
“That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.” —Genesis 11:9
NOAH (“Noah”)
Genesis 6:9–11:32
It’s one of the great diy projects of all time. Noah is reintroduced as a righteous man who “walks with God.” He lives at a time in which the earth is in such an anarchical state, God reveals an intention to destroy humanity. Noah is instructed to prepare for a flood by constructing an immense ark and then filling it with his family—wife, sons, and their partners—as well as animals of every kind, both male and female. Noah may be 600 years old, but he does what he is told and prepares for a forthcoming deluge, which God claims will last for forty days and forty nights.
The rains begin and last as long as predicted. Water swallows up even the highest mountains, covering the land for almost six months. Every human being and all of the earth’s creatures are wiped out. The only remaining forms of life exist within the belly of the ark.
In the seventh month, the waters finally begin to recede, and the vessel comes to rest on Mount Ararat. Noah employs a dove to test the flood level. The first time it goes out, it circles back, unable to find a resting place.
Seven days later, it brings an olive branch back in its mouth, which Noah considers a good sign. A week later, the bird does not return.
After little more than a year, Noah disembarks and sets the animals free. God instructs him to be fertile, and Noah responds by offering a sacrifice in God’s honor. The Lord sets out a series of laws that Noah must follow and promises never again to destroy humanity, unleashing a mighty rainbow as a mark of that intent.
Noah becomes a farmer, but drinks far too much wine while planting his vineyard. Ham, Noah’s youngest son, discovers his father passed out and naked in his tent and tells his other brothers. Those two treat their father with a lot more respect than Ham, covering his nudity while taking great pains to ensure they don’t glimpse him in this vulnerable state.
When Noah recovers and realizes how his youngest son has behaved, he curses him, dictating that Ham’s descendants will be Canaan, a slave nation to his brothers’ offspring. Despite this unfortunate incident, Noah lives an additional 350 years, finally passing away at the ripe old age of 950. His sons’ progeny become nations that populate the entire earth.
Every human speaks the same language until the population in one of the regions decides to build a city that will gain renown by hosting a tower that soars up into the heavens. God is angered by the vanity of this concept. Disappointed that the residents have abused the power of communication, God scatters the citizens across the earth, forcing them to speak different languages so they can no longer automatically understand one another. The building project ceases, and God calls the place Babel, which would become a pun, as it was the town that compelled the world’s languages to be mixed.
Shem’s descendants are listed through the generations until we learn of a man named Abram, heading out for Canaan with his wife, Sarai, who is, regrettably, childless.
THIRTY-SEVEN STATEMENTS ON BABEL
i My first word was What?
ii I ask my writing class to list words they love. Then to list words they hate. The hate list is fun. Every year, someone says moist and everyone cringes. They can hardly stand it! Usually someone puts shit on their love list, and another student across the room puts shit on the hate list.
iii Amichai, an Israeli scholar, tells me that the word for ark, teva, can also mean “word.” Teva means “sacred container,” something holding the seed for life, and Noah’s ark was definitely that, but it could also be translated as “word,” a box containing a sacred meaning. So according to that interpretation, Noah got those animals two by two, the elephants, the cheetahs, the marmots, the radiant eels, and he put them all on a word.
iv A few lines later, it’s the Tower of Babel. The people were building a tower, and everyone spoke the same language.
v God came in and was angry at the power of the united human front and made the one language into many languages. “There the Lord confounded the speech of the whole earth.”
vi It must’ve been different then. Just because you speak the same language doesn’t mean you can understand the person.
vii We had that bad spat in the deli. You thought I meant that I wanted to go with you to the cop movie. But I didn’t say that! I knew it was a moment for you to have special time with your friend! I said I wanted to go with you to the next cop movie. You didn’t hear me. Maybe I forgot to say “next.” It took us an hour to get through it. You looked so upset. I was crying.
viii We both speak English.
ix My friend has a daughter. When her daughter was born, she was blonde with light eyes. My friend has dark hair and dark eyes. She was so surprised. She had expected a child who would look a little like Anne Frank, as my friend looks a little like Anne Frank, as many Jewish women do. But her daughter looked more like Aunt Katie from Nevada.
x “Do you know what I mean?” “You know?” “Does that make sense?”
xi “I’m so surprised!” said my friend on the phone. “Who is this person?”
xii Ants operate as a string of neurons. The ant brain is spread out amongst the group of ants. Before the Tower of Babel was broken, all the people must’ve been of one mind, kind of like a group of tower-building ants. We were not so separate if we all truly spoke the same language, if we all could really communicate that clearly, if all our words were the same. We were groupthink. We were oneness.
xiii Then my friend reconsidered. I could hear the gurgling baby sounds on the other side of the phone line. “I don’t know her yet,” she admitted. “If she had looked like Anne Frank, I would’ve assumed that I knew her, that she was just like me.”
xiv If you see an ant separate from its line of ants, it will wander around. If it does not find the group again, it will die.
xv André Breton, father of surrealism, wrote in 1924 in his brilliant Surrealist Manifesto, “Keep reminding yourself that literature is the saddest road that leads to everything.”
xvi What the hell is he talking about?
xvii I have it on the wall in my office. I read it and reread it. Why the saddest road?
xviii Here it is in its original French: Dites-vous bien que la littérature est un des plus tristes chemins qui mènent à tout.
xix Flaubert says, “[N]one of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.”
xx Tripping and falling and flubbing and rephrasing.
xxi Flaubert’s talking gorgeously about the inadequacy of our tools, but I enjoy thinking of bears in a forest, dancing.
xxii Metaphor is beautiful. It is also failure. Simile: It is like, the sun is like, your body is like, my heart is like. This is one of our very best ways to describe experience, which is at its core a way to admit we cannot directly ever describe experience.
xxiii In the story, God gave us our separateness.
xxiv My friend’s daughter is not my friend. Even if she had looked like Anne Frank, she would not have been my friend. It was actually helpful that they looked so different, so there would be no confusion over who was who.
xxv We came in on a word. We were all the same mind, speaking the same words. Then God made us different.
xxvi It is sad.
xxvii It is also true.
xxviii It is also kind of relieving. We were never ants to begin with.
xxix We try and try. Try to communicate. Try again. Misunderstand again.
xxx That other fight we had on the way to the national park? Awful! I cannot believe you said that! When I say, “Turn right,” I mean “turn right”!
xxxi There is the bear waltz. And the bear Charleston.
xxxii The tower crashed. After the dust cleared, the people looked around, bewildered, coughing. They all began talking at once. It was loud and confusing. Some sounds were guttural. Some fluid. Someone was singing a song no one had ever heard before, to a melody that had no match.
xxxiii I was weeping on the ground and a man walked by. “We’re through,” I said. “It’s over!” Babies were crying in the distance. Someone threw a handful of pebbles at the sky. The man sat on a rock next to me. He was wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette. “Do you speak English?” I asked, even though that was the first time I’d ever called it English. He shook his head. “Je ne comprends pas,” he shrugged. He finished his cigarette and then lightly twisted it under his. . .
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