Parashat Bereishit, Genesis 1:1–6:8

Haftarah: Isaiah 42:5–21

Dear TBE Community,

Welcome back to the beginning! During this new parsha cycle, I plan to write each week about a place or a name from the weekly portion and look more deeply into either the concept, the geography, the story, or the etymology behind it.

Notions of the significance of places and names are woven into Torah from the very beginning, when God creates places, or spaces, and names them:

God made the expanse, and it separated the water that was below the expanse from the water that was above the expanse. And it was so. God called the expanse Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. God said, “Let the water below the sky be gathered into one area, that the dry land may appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth and called the gathering of waters Seas. And God saw that this was good. (Genesis 1:7–10)

Later, God also gives humanity a name:

When God created humankind, it was made in the likeness of God; they were created male and female. And when they were created, God blessed them and called them Humankind. (Genesis 5:1–2)

It will be the human who has the privilege of giving names to all the cattle, the birds of the sky, and all the wild beasts – and eventually also to their fellow human being:

This one at last

Is bone of my bones

And flesh of my flesh.

This one shall be called the Woman,

For from the Man was she taken. (Genesis 2:23)

In Judaism, God-self is known by many names. From among the traditional seventy names, I want to focus on two: השםHaShem – the Name – and המקום HaMakom: the Place.

While these names are rabbinic, not biblical, the concept that God is both name and place comes up repeatedly in Torah, for example in Deuteronomy 12:5:

Look only to the place that the ETERNAL your God will choose amidst all your tribes as God’s habitation, to establish the divine name there.

Humans, too, are defined and remembered by place and name: the place we are from, the place we live in. The name(s) we are known by; the name we make for ourselves. The place where we left footprints, the place where they still say our name.

Gan Eden, paradise, is the name of a place that holds all our memories and embodies all our longings. It is a realm that we imagine like a physical place, though for all we know it is intangible, immaterial. We imagine it as the good, ideal place, the embodiment of innocence and ease – and at the same time, it is a place and name that represents loss.

At this moment, I’d like to zoom out a bit, into the realm of secular entertainment and storytelling.

I often wonder how it is that, when we are still young – children, really – we sometimes have a notion, almost an epiphany or vision, of what will shape or fascinate us throughout our lives. As a child, I often experienced places as guardians of memories. A certain place, for me, was often a dear companion I had to leave behind and that I would remember as almost sacred for many years. But I couldn’t have expressed that feeling in words; I didn’t have reference points outside my own experience.

This changed when I was twelve. That winter, we spent our ski vacation in Zermatt, Switzerland. The movie Out of Africa (which in German is known as Jenseits von Afrika, i.e., East of Africa, like in Jenseits von, or East of Eden) was the blockbuster of the season, and people stood freezing in a long line outside the theater, hoping to get in before it sold out. My parents and I were lucky, and on a screen halfway cluttered with subtitles in German, French, Italian, and Japanese, I saw the movie for the first time. To this day, whenever I hear the words “I had a farm in Africa…” I have the same reaction I had then: I can’t hold back tears. And the wistful yearning of Meryl Streep’s closing monologue always does me in:

Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on? Or will the children invent a game in which my name is? Or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the driveway that was like me? Or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?

This movie resonated with me because at the age of twelve, I knew longing for a lost place, a place that felt like the embodiment of a person’s, my, name. I knew about lost paradises. Just a few months before, my family had moved from Worms in the southwest of Germany to a town in the north, and the sensation of having been uprooted, driven out of a place where I thought I’d raise my own family was formative during my coming of age.

I believe that this visceral experience also prepared me for Torah’s sensitivity to places, to names.

Torah records place names meticulously, the name a place is known by “to this day,” or what its name used to be. The same meticulousness is applied to the long lists of genealogies, the תולדות, the toledot, the names of the generations that followed in a person’s footsteps at the foot of the hills, in the moonlight over the desert, in the quiver of a color.

Places have a past, too. In fact, the first time the word toledot appears in Torah is not as an introduction to a person’s family tree. Rather, it refers to a place in the broadest sense: the world: Such is the story (these are the lines) of heaven and earth when they were created. (Genesis 2:4)

Knowing and being meticulous about the names of people and places can be an expression of power, of ownership. It can also be an expression of love. I have written before about my fascination with the Jewish literary tradition of merging the experience of the divine with the experience of love. Maybe the roots of that fascination also go back to that wintry movie night in Zermatt forty years ago, to the scene of a double-decker plane flying over the vast African landscape, when Meryl Streep begins to tell of her love relationship with the man who took her on that plane ride:

He gave me an incredible gift. A glimpse of the world through God’s eye. And I thought: Yes. I see. This is the way it was intended.

I wasn’t very religious then, but I always had a sense and respect for divinity. I don’t know if it’s true, but in hindsight I say that seeing that movie influenced how I would come to look at romantic love, or what I would come to expect from it: The movie seemed to say that flying on the wings of a lover’s plane over the African savannah was like seeing the light of paradise, seeing the world as it was intended by God. Watch the link, you will feel as if reading the first verses of Bereishit: It is like seeing creation in the way it was deemed “good.” It is like catching a glimpse of that locked garden that humans have tried to enter through music and poetry, through artmaking and lovemaking since time immemorial.

Yet while no real-world geography can locate Gan Eden, the description of the garden does include real geographic markers:

A river issues from Eden to water the garden, and it then divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon, the one that winds through the whole land of Havilah, where the gold is. (The gold of that land is good; bdellium is there, and lapis lazuli.) The name of the second river is Gihon, the one that winds through the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, the one that flows east of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (Genesis 2:10–14)

Torah here gives details that are precise and concise enough to plant us firmly on the ground of what we can know: Tigris and Euphrates exist, mamash. Yet then Torah shrouds this firm ground in layers of hiddenness and mystery; it gives hints that seem to lead someplace, and then they don’t. As with good poetry, there always remains a secret, an unexplained vacuum, a canvas for the projection of our own inventory of images. A garden we can unlock in our dreams; a space of lingering non-resolution.

Here’s a substantial overview of the attempts scholars have made to determine where Eden might have been, or might be, located. Or rather, what actual, real-life landscape might have served as a model for it.

Because of Tigris and Euphrates, the “location” of paradise has often been presumed to be in Mesopotamia. What does that say about the culture that produced the creation story as recorded in Genesis 2? Where is its center of gravity? In the east or in the west? In the land of the Chaldeans or in the land of Canaan?

Torah states that Abraham’s family came from Ur-Chasdim, from the southern Euphrates area, and made their way up along the river to Haran, from where Abraham eventually departed for the place God would show him.

If the divinely promised land is in the west, why is Eden – paradise, the place only God knows – “in the east,” the place where Abraham’s family originally came from? Did humanity, after the expulsion from that paradisiacal place, slowly made its way from “East of Eden” to the west, from Cain’s darkness east of the east to the setting sun Abraham prayed to in the west—always longing to see the sun rise again in Eden?

Maybe here lies a hint of what Eden is: It is a place that feels familiar, where we once were. Whose name we know and whose light we have seen and still carry within us, but we can’t return to in this life.

Regardless of where Eden is located, it sure is a place of water.

We just ended our seasonal cycle with Sukkot and its water libation rituals, the prayer for rain, and the change to mashiv haRuach umorid haGashem in the Amidah liturgy. The first creation story mentions the separation of waters, and the second story begins with a well springing up (Genesis 2:6) and a river (that) issues from Eden to water the garden, and it then divides and becomes four branches. (Genesis 2:10)

Staying with the motif of waters and rivers: In Parashat Bereishit, we encounter the name of a descendant of Cain: Yuval, the ancestor of all who play the lyre and the pipe. (Genesis 4:17–21)

Yuval, a common modern Hebrew name for both men and women, means “stream,” “brook,” or “tributary,” and it seems fitting that the ancestor of all musicians would be named after the serene flow of waters that sound like flutes and lyres.

There is no paradise without streams of water. There is no paradise without music. And there is no paradise without the notion that it can be lost. In Out of Africa, Denys Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen’s love, dies in a crash with the same plane in which he took her into the expanse between sky and earth.

In Psalm 137, the Israelites, exiled from Zion, are sitting songless by the rivers of Babylon, their lyres hung up in the trees: How can we sing a song of God on foreign soil? (Psalm 137:4)

Ancient Babylonia was situated on the banks of the Euphrates, the great river of the Torah’s east. Many generations after the weeping for Zion, prestigious Talmudic academies bloomed along that same river. Maybe, in Gan Eden, everyone who once wept, at the foot of the Kenyan Ngong Hills or by the banks of the Euphrates, sits by those same hills, that same river. Feet in ever streaming and flowing water, playing lyre and flute. In a place unknown that is neither in the west nor the east and that nobody sees until they enter the garden.

Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Julia Knobloch