Primrose Road

God is a "dual-gendered deity," according to one rabbi about to publish an article entitled "Who is He? He is She: The Secret Four-Letter Name of God." (The Hebrew word for "he" is "hoo" and the Hebrew word for "she" is "hee," hence the puns in the article title. Most of us already came up with that clever bit of wordplay in Hebrew school.) His argument is as follows: - The Tetragrammaton (secret, unpronounceable name of God) is spelled yod-hay-vav-hay in Hebrew. - Backwards, that reads hay-vav-hay-yod. - Hebrew word for he: הו, or hay-vav; Hebrew word for she: הי, or hay-yod. - God's name backwards is "He-She"; therefore, God is dual-gendered. (My name in Hebrew spelled backwards (הרף) means "to leave alone".) Language: ur doin' it wrong.

This week's Parshah (Torah portion): Moses' great-nephew is rewarded for his zealotry; he receives a "covenant of peace" because he killed a prince and princess from two non-Hebrew tribes who indeed posed a serious threat to Moses and his people. In the Torah, the vav (ו) in the word "shalom" (שלום) is broken. This story is followed by a story of five women who, facing an injustice, ask the question, "is there another way?"

If I flip a coin fifty times, that coin could land heads-up fifty times in a row. The Law of Truly Large Numbers reminds us that events we perceive as unusual/impossible/miraculous are actually more commonplace, and more possible, than we might think. It would thus be rather narcissistic for me to ask why a coin has landed heads-up fifty times in a row, or to ask whether that series of events was a sign designed personally for me or anyone else. Last night, I attended a Limmud salon (a Jewish learning event) that explored the ways in which we could "interpret" everyday life using the same methods that Torah scholars use to interpret the Torah. I go to these events even though I don't believe in anything supernatural; they're interesting cultural experiences and they allow me to play fun ideology-critiquing games in the grad student brain that I'm pretty sure I wear outside my head nowadays. The teacher leading the session identified two views of uncanny repetitions in everyday life: (1) the Biblical, which says that the spiritual is in everything from food to writing to toothpaste to coin-tosses, and that everything happens for a reason; (2) the academic, which says "shit happens." Here is what I did not say: "Those views both sound awfully complacent." I also did not say that I don't know of many academic types who would shrug their shoulders, say "shit happens," and walk away. Instead, many might examine how and why we tell ourselves that everything happens for a reason as a way of keeping ourselves complacent. And if we seek to identify repetitions in life experiences for the purpose of interpreting those repetitions as though they were repeated words in a verse from the Torah, perhaps it's because we narcissistically dream of a personal god and a world that exists for us, a life that is meant to be read, interpreted, annotated like the Bible or a closet drama. Let's talk Hamlet for a moment now (since, after all, all life experience and knowledge is contained in that play ... or not): After witnessing Ophelia's burial, which I suspect crushes him, our favorite Nice Danish Boy tells Horatio that he's sleepless, torn apart over what's happened. But then, he once again proves himself entirely self-absorbed: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," he (famously) says, "Rough-hew them how we will" (5.2.10-11). Hamlet turns to God, Providence and destiny in order to absolve himself of the specific, fatal failures that lead to Polonius' and Ophelia's deaths. If there is a fatal flaw in the character of Hamlet, it is his willingness to attribute his failures to fate, suppressing what he knows in favor what what can all-too-easily be believed.