Chapter 3, Ancient Torah for the 22d Century
By Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Copyright (c) 2025 by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
“Come on, Farmer! Don’t you have anything nice to say about my First Story of Creation besides praise for the Seven-Day structure?”
“Well, Priestess, I loved the way Midrash, not you, took care of your too-early liberation of Women by imagining 'Lilith — Night-woman' — to dig you out of a Hole in the Torah. I seem to be blessed with long-sight into the Future, and I heard some bumptious Rabbi named Marker named his daughter 'Lilith.' The printer of his birth-naming invitations refused to print it with such a name — After all . . . a demoness! — Too scared? But I think they all decided in favor of some wickedness in some women in their generation!”
“Midrash got Lilith into the story, But I wish you had made a whole tribe of her offspring.”
“I had my hands full dealing with the consequence that you, Farmer, put at the end of your story of Eden. First, to punish Snake, you said he’d have to slither on Earth, not walk like most animals. Big deal! I am as wide a reader in the Future as you are, and I recognize a Rudyard Kipling ‘Just So’ story when I see it. All the snakes you know slither, so you write a story intended to show why all Snakes slither. Or maybe you wrote the first ‘Just So’ story and Kipling copied you.”
“It was the second and third ‘consequences’ stories that made trouble. First you punished men for eating from the Tree by saying men would find it hard and painful to grow crops for other men to eat. Luckily you didn’t say ‘forever,’ so the men promptly started inventing rakes and hoes and a bit later, big complicated harvesters to make farming easier.”
“BUT then something weird happened. The third consequence was like the second — no ‘forever’ where it punished women for eating from the Tree by saying they would serve men. They were free, like the men, to invent ways of freeing themselves.
"But punishments must not last forever, if they are to teach. So both the punishments for men and those for women should teach them not to gobble the whole Garden ‘until the seventh generation after Eden.'"
But even after that, they seldom tried, and every time they did the men batted them down.
“That’s why I didn’t give Lilith a tribe. ALL women could make freedom for themselves. It took three thousand years and wow! They are getting good at it now! Even though some men are trying to stop them.”
Midrash interrupted their conversation: “The two punishments were intended to remind the whole future human species to love Earth, not gobble everything in sight. But every teaching must have a limit in time. People either get it or they don’t.
“That is why as Midrash I called forth our best poetry, the Song of Songs. It teaches through delight, not punishment, that men and women and all other genders should love each other, not dominate each other. It teaches through delight that Humanity and Earth should love each other.”
So all three – Priestess, Farmer, and Midrash –began to laugh and sing together.
“The Song of Songs must be
the heart and soul
of a Torah for the 22nd Century.”