Parashat Bereshit, 5765, Josh Gressel
Parashat Bereshit Genesis 1:1-6:8
Delivered 9 October 2004 / 24 Tishrei 5765
Josh Gressel
Shabbat Shalom.
My day job is as a psychologist, and my passion is marriage counseling. I want to talk about marriage and sacred commitment through the lens of today's parashah.
Before going any farther, I need to insert a caveat. Statistically, 50% of the heterosexual adults here either have been or will be divorced. I do not mean anything I say here to be taken as a critique on anyone personally. No one wakes up in the morning and says: "Gee, I think I'll be irresponsible today. I'll bail out of my commitments, wreck my kids' lives and create financial havoc for the family."
My critique is partly professional, partly cultural. The professional piece is that I think too many marriage therapists, either in the name of scientific objectivity or simply because they too come from broken homes, are too ready for divorce to be an option. At the very least they are reticent to take a strong stand. It took me by surprise to find that probably the single most important thing I bring to a couple is a passionate advocacy on behalf of their marriage. I tell my couples I'm a marriage counselor, not a divorce counselor, and if they want a divorce they should go elsewhere. The vast majority of people are relieved to be given some counterpoint to the nareshkeit that passes for cultural mores on marriage, which brings me to my second critique.
I don't believe our culture, with its emphasis on the individual and the material, supports the kind of sacrifice needed to make a marriage work. When was the last time you saw a movie or television show that depicted the ways in which marriage can deepen and richen the longer a couple stayed together? What we are shown is the titillation and intoxication of the chase and of falling in love. We aren't shown how to make it work once the first flush of romance ends and the problems begin.
The message from our culture is that if it isn't fun, sexy, or if it doesn't feel good, something must be wrong. I believe that much in committed relationships is not fun, is not sexy and doesn't feel good. The honeymoon always ends; the power struggle always begins. This is the normal developmental sequence; it is not signaling something wrong with the relationship. It's supposed to happen. It's why we hooked up in the first place, but I'll get to this later.
I want to turn first to our parashah, to see what we can learn about relationships from it, beginning with Adam and Eve. The first thing we need to do in reviewing this over-learned material is to be aware that in the Hebrew, Adam and Chava have very different linguistic connotations than come through in the English. In English we think of Adam and Eve as a distinct couple with the guy named Adam and the woman named Eve, kind of like Ken and Barbie.
The Hebrew is much broader and deeper. Adam shares the same root as adama, meaning "earth," and dam, meaning "blood." Rabbi Steven Greenberg suggests that a more accurate rendering of Adam in English would probably be "earthling."
Chava shares the same root as chavaya, meaning "experience." But the way we normally mean experience -- "that was a good experience" -- is in Hebrew "nisayon." Chavaya is like: "last week I climbed Half Dome. Zot hayta memash chavaya" -- it's a deep experience. So what we have is not so much Ken and Barbie as "earthling" and "deep experience," giving us a more archetypal rendering of two primordial beings.
Next, let's look at the creation of Adam more closely. Genesis 1:27 reads:
"And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female he created them."
First we have a repetition: "And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him." And then we switch pronouns to "male and female he created them." What do we make of this switch? Certainly one way to read this is that Adam, earthling, is androgynous: "male and female he created them."
I think there's further support for this view if we read of how Eve is created from Adam's tsele. This word is usually translated as "rib" and we have this somewhat demeaning notion that primordial woman was created from primordial man by putting Adam to sleep and removing one of his ribs. It doesn't really make any sense.
It makes a lot more sense if we use a different translation for "tsela," where tsela means "side," as in "meshulash shve tsela'ot" which means an equilateral triangle. So if we think of Eve as being created from a "side" of Adam, which is perfectly consistent with the Hebrew, we get a description where Adam is originally created both male and female, but is split into two genders and two people with the creation of Chava.
Let's return back to our relationships and think about what this might be telling us. We have all heard the statements about "my better half," "I feel whole with him," "I'm only half a man without her." These things are usually said early on in the relationship, before the power struggle blocks out some of the essential truth this choice of language betrays.
Like Adam, we are created in a state of primordial unity. Through the deep experiences of our early life -- the chavayot, if you will, of gender identification, socialization, and a whole bunch of other things I don't pretend to understand, we are split just like Adam and Chava.
We express a part of ourselves outwardly, and we leave a whole bunch dormant and unexpressed inwardly, much of it outside our conscious awareness. When we partner with another we are seeking to regain that sense of wholeness we lost when part of ourselves went underground. Our life's partner is that person we choose, with incredible pin-point accuracy, to help us on this journey.
The goal of relationships, I believe, is not happiness, but wholeness. If our primary goal is happiness, then the kind of compromise and sacrifice required by committed relationship is always going to disappoint us. If we look instead to the ways in which our partners help us toward wholeness, and we partner together in that endeavor, then we'll be happy. But happiness has to be the by product, not the primary goal.
How do we help each other become whole? Let's turn once more to our parasha for insight. Again, I think we have suffered from translations which are part interpretations because the literal Hebrew didn't make sense or was somehow offensive to the translator. When God says: "It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him," we are again given to understand that Chava is created to serve Adam, to be his "helper." The Hebrew -- ezer kenegdo -- translates literally as "helper as opposed to him." So rather than getting a submissive helper, Adam is given someone who will help him through her very difference, through her opposition to him. We can think of it as two opposing forces which balance each other and provide added strength, like opposite sides of an arch which support a building.
It is a truism that we fall in love with someone for a particular quality, and then we want to divorce them for it afterwards. Or as one of my teachers put it, we hire our spouse to do something, and then we want to fire them for doing it. David marries Sara because she's down to earth and responsible and he feels safe with her. Sara marries David because he's artistic, spontaneous and very fun to be with. A few years into their marriage David can't stand Sara because she's always worried about money and squelches any opportunities for fun. Sara can't stand David because he's irresponsible and she feels she has another child to raise along with their newborn baby.
I would propose that David and Sara are being an "ezer kenegdo" for each other. What is required for each of them to claim their wholeness is that they stop trying to change the other and start trying to become their full selves. David would need to clear out whatever Peter Pan fantasies are keeping him from acting like a fully responsible adult. Sara would need to learn to trust life and herself long enough to let go of her control and let her own creativity and spontaneity out.
Harville Hendrix writes that we are attracted to our partners for their positive and negative resemblance to important people from our childhood, usually our parents. He describes the radar like process by which we scan our prospective mates, finding a match only when we see someone who contains both these positive and negative qualities. He posits that the real work of our marriages, the real but usually unconscious contract we sign with the ketuba, is that our partner will help us face the demons and baggage we bring from our childhood by being just enough like one of our parents to make us deal with these issues. The purpose behind this is another wrinkle on our striving for our wholeness: for us to have the opportunity to transcend the programming and wounds we inherited from our parents, who inherited them from their parents, and so on through the generations. From this perspective, David and Sara, in their struggles, would be replaying parental scripts from their respective childhoods.
This too I believe is laid out in our parasha, where it says:
"Thus shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be as one flesh."
Yes, it is referring to a physical leaving of the home. But it also refers to an emotional leaving and a psychological leaving. Each partner must cleave unto whomever their partner actually is: without the filter of their respective parents, without the tapes they play from their personal history channel. Then they can become as one flesh, whole, in God's image.
Shabbat shalom.