Day Six, Day Seven

...His will filled the fibers of rocks and the bones of the soil, and life ripped itself from the earth...

...The impulse to look for Jewish continuity in fiction—signaled by the institution of book reviews from the pulpit in the late nineteenth century—was not at all unreasonable, and probably depended equally on the moral status of the novel for the middle class, and Jewish readers' intuitive understanding that no tradition is alive that is not imaginatively engaged...

...Relaxing, God assessed the present and felt Himself satisfied...

...Longing to read a familiar textual coherence into modern Elinor Grumet is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Brown University...

...At that time too they would understand that hunger returns, and they would see all fruit differently once some of it had been forbidden without reason...

...It fell the long way to earth, where a man and a woman already sat perplexed, looking around, intuiting the commandment of generation and the imperative of mastery...

...Strong and close to the shoulders of the earth, the grasses—that were older than the stars—had dug deep into the ground I and covered it...

...Geese pecked in confusion at stones...

...And in the lakes, galaxies of protozoa floated aimlessly, limp with appetite...

...The inspiration was too large and impatient for discussion, too fierce for conciliation...

...As quickly as they appeared, the sky reabsorbed the design of events...

...When we encourage the literacy of children, we refine their capacities for communication, empathy, research, and entertainment...

...This world was really very good...

...these consciously composed stories intend only to deepen imaginative connection with the text without necessarily adovcating its divine origin or the observant life that may follow from such a belief...

...Call the other "textuality"— our potential ability to live in an ongoing and active reciprocal relation with a text...

...There was a murmur of assent among the rational faculties...

...That is, can a literary tradition continue to exist apart from its traditional way of reading...

...they shall be yours for food...

...Only the stories we tell with confident liberty of detail are the ones we deeply possess...

...I offer an original mid-rash below—less in a spirit of demonstration than of trial...

...and He concluded that this lithe and multiform creation was appropriate...

...But individuals can re-establish that textual connection for themselves...

...But nothing on the flowering earth attracted them, for though they had the instinct of hunger, they lacked still the conception of food...

...And it was a little foolish to minimize the specificity of devotion it takes to maintain a folk...

...But is it realistic to think that America would produce Sholom Aleichem today, in our circumstances...

...But at that moment, on the evening of the sixth day, the man and the woman fell back out of the leaves satisfied, cradling vegetables, their faces sticky with juice...

...Others pleaded the clear danger of the proposition...

...It was a little romantic, some believed, to bring so daring a creature into being simply to consume vegetation...

...The moon was still out, pale, two evenings old, not quite half full.' That morning nameless black birds flew screeching out of the unweathered trees...

...And can it be significantly continued by those whose textual faculties have been trained largely in a different literary canon...

...a child is taught to communicate, to empathize, to do research, and to entertain himself within the range of a prescribed history and set of venerated ideas...

...Each way engages different values...

...And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day...

...They ate with profound appetite...

...God blessed them and God said to them, "Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it...

...As the living beings of the world ate for the first time, the sun was setting behind them...

...On the seventh day God finished the work which He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work which He had done...

...On the eighth day of Creation, when the life of the universe would begin in earnest, the woman and the man would cry in horrified discovery of the muddy compromise of their nature, and begin their long careers as the dupes and purveyors of lies...

...and in the trees they saw the small husks of nuts...

...In just another day they would know all three kinds of light—the light of the sun, God's crystalline fire, and the light struck by their own hands in the first panic of night...

...Suddenly and with jubilant violence God tore the fabric of the universe, and in that moment Truth lost its footing and fell out of the sky...

...Had He been too enthusiastic, and created something superfluous, a vast garden merely beautiful...

...But textuality, on the other hand, is trained by devoted and repeated attention to a specific group of texts, a canon...

...By now it's obvious that the pre-modern Jewish folk cannot be reconstituted, nor can the sacred books be actively and imaginatively reclaimed on a large scale...

...And some felt it impolitic for Divinity to expose Itself to the contingencies of earth...

...The first Sabbath was celebrated with the world feasting in the flow of primal light, God regretting that sudden darkness should be the man and woman's first experience of inevitable change...

...Midrashv is the word that has been appropriated from Rabbinical literature for contemporary use, to describe the stories born of individuals' imaginative reengagement with Jewish texts without necessary reference to issues of halachah...

...Their divinity would be experienced as a longing only—another hunger—the frustrated assertions of the Truth that had fallen out of the sky at their creation, struggling to regain its place...

...Using the word "midrash" itself, instead ofaggadah" or "legend," is a sly way of keeping company with Rabbinic authority, of claiming the license to spin out of the Biblical narrative, of asserting a devotion not less significant for defining now only a part of personality...

...and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth...

...Day Six, Day Seven God said, "Let the earth bring forth every kind of living creature: cattle, creeping things, and wild beasts of every kind...

...Irony made a side remark about God ingesting...

...male and female He created them...

...On the afternoon of the sixth day, God felt a vague longing...

...From the wind God willed the hundred turns of conscious and unconscious thought...

...And God saw the intelligence of the earth—the muscularity of roots and the subtlety of leaves— and He commanded the earth to yield its power to animal, as well as vegetable life...

...And all the birds and fish and reptiles and large and small beasts ate the fruits of the earth with appetite, and felt completed...

...The incredible sun was higher now over that world vigorous only in land-i scape...

...Propriety asked to be excused...

...As He thought, the objects of the supernatural world passed in aurora over the heads of the preoccupied animals...

...It was certainly a mistake to forget that the desired feeling of Jewish ongoingness has always been grounded in specific history and textual canon...

...The Kaplanesque hope that the synagogue would become a folk-center has perhaps led us to put too much faith in DAYSDC, DAY SEVEN ON SPINNING MIDRASHIM EUNOR GRUMET the fully programmed and engineered community...

...Great whales in the sea rolled over in cavernous longing for what they did not yet know as a meal...

...It grew from the final verses of the sixth day of creation, where God brings into being the last thing before resting—the concept of food...

...Under their feet, they felt the swell of onions and potatoes...

...I have included in my retelling of the sixth and seventh days of Creation some traditional legends, for they are an intrinsic part of the literature I wanted to reclaim...

...God made wild beasts of every kind and cattle of every kind, and all kinds of creeping things of the earth...

...Noticing this, I was first led to wonder about the hunger of the animals created on the fifth day, and then to think about the nature of appetite in general...

...But Truth was agitated beyond control, and no longer able to tolerate the false democracy of these heavenly councils and the Creator's penchant for unimaginable complication, screamed defiantly, "You know as well as I do that this creature will tell lies...

...The failure of novels and short stories (both satirical and pious) to satisfy modern Jewry's literary folk-hunger raises some large questions: Can a body of work called Jewish Literature, to which we feel textually connected in the ongoing, active, and reciprocal sense, continue into the modern period when not only our familiarity with the Biblical and Rabbinic canon has diminished, but our very capacity to read textually has gone undeveloped...

...High over their heads, in the slate-orange light of dusk, God was thinking about this man and woman and excitedly imagining His part in their history...

...Some connection was still to be made...

...But for the moment, they were drawn to the colorful bulbs hidden all around them in the foliage—the cucumbers and avocados, the huckleberries and peaches and tomatoes...

...His own sense of incompletion corresponded...

...High-shouldered and close to the ground, striped and spotted cats ran on the plains...

...And Justice felt obliged to add, "It will certainly be reasonably just...

...And God saw that this was good...

...The thoughts were agitated and argued among themselves...

...The stars and moon reflected stronger light that night, a white and crystalline light from God Himself—the creation of the first day that had illuminated the world before the sun and moon were even conceived...

...God said, "See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit...

...Bears roared suddenly in the woods...

...They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on the earth...

...All around the dull-eyed birds, bright pink flowers opened like the mouths of their yet unborn young...

...They knew that all they saw was there for them to make sense of...

...Claiming the inheritance" has, after all, always been an individual responsibility...

...Only a ram, chewing, looked up from a tangle of branches and saw stone tablets pass before a colossal rainbow—and after them a walking stick with the diamond markings of a snake in its bark, then clusters of protean snowy manna, the sudden mouth of the earth in the desert, water bubbling from a dry well, and a donkey able to speak with sensitivity...

...Ripe pears hung in pear trees, apples in apple trees, and clusters of dates rested in the tall throats of palms...

...God ruminated, "Shall we create a creature named after the earth, but also sharing our nature...

...At first the idea scudded in the clouds, needing negotiation...

...reality, many have turned to the genre that has claimed precisely that cohering power for itself— modern fiction—and they have been disappointed...

...God saw the wit of the skins of animals, how they enclosed more intricate systems than the earth which had borne them...

...A self-indulgence, really...

...But the Lord was restless, and the sky shifted thunderously, so that the sun arched more towards the sea...

...They invented song on that long and illuminated Sabbath, when the earth and heaven balanced each other in them...

...any and all books are appropriate to that end...

...And God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...

...The distinction between literacy and textuality suggests that there are two ways to read a book...

...And there were elephants and ants and cows and snakes and dogs and horses and turtles...

...The expectation has all along been double and self-contradictory: that a devotion to "Jewish fiction" (either by or about Jews, or both) would establish Jewish readers as cultivated people, and at the same time provide them with a native folk literature...

...It was certainly a point...

...Throughout this century, American Jews have yearned for an American-Jewish literature to which they might feel textually connected in that ongoing, active and reciprocal way the traditional Jew related to Torah...

...The heaven and the earth were finished, and all their array...

...The sentient world had lived a first night of sex—and famine...

...But the surplus fruit distressed Him...

...The longing for imaginative continuity, for the extension in literary play of the old mythology and its combination with the new facts of life, has lingered against all evidence that the Jewish textual and imaginative line cannot continue among the folk uninterrupted without a general resurgence of study or piety...

...Concession conceded...

...The idea came as a question...

...And leathery brontosaurs stood against the sky like cities...

...But the wisdom of the American impulse has been its understanding that imaginative engagement with stories is a measure of the liveness of a tradition...

...The sun was gone from the garden now, as the earth, pitching through space, continued its banquet...

...With no imagination of loss or of discord, the man and woman filled the world that day with a harmony in two parts...

...Here is the test: we can palpably measure the distance the Tanach has moved from the center of our lives when the Biblical stories feel awkward in our mouths, and, unsure, we hesitate to embellish them...

...And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him...

...A creature both powerfully low and powerfully high...

...And to all the animals on land, to all the birds of the sky, and to everything that creeps on earth, in which there is the breath of life, I give all the green plants for food...

...Awake and hungry, they rose in masses from the leaves to look for something suggesting satiety...

...Would He have to destroy this world for its structural imperfection, like the six others before it...

...Mid-rash has thus been given a modern twist...

...hence each way rests on different pedagogy...

...And God saw all that He had made, and found it very good...

...Genesis 1:24-31, 2:1-2 The sun rose in the stars of Tishrei...

...Encouraging the textuality of children, we refine their capacity to engage the wisdom of a particular literary tradition and to adapt and interpret its idiom for further transmission...

...And it was so...

...And it was so...

...Why not—it was asked—why not assume that the animals were enervated for lack of this very surplus vegetation, and so round off the design without further complication by commanding them to eat...

...Sensing the mood, Generosity said quietly, "This creature, whatever its limitations, will be generous after all...

...And what was the creaturely longing on the breath of all the animate beings...

...The trees and bushes were crowded with a senseless sweet pulp, far beyond the need for seeds: Everywhere there were bananas, blackberries, apricots, peppers, corn, and plums...

...But darkness never came...

...and the host of them came close together, quarreling and gossiping—one jealous, one benevolent, one mischievous, one forgiving— all the articulate, insubstantial ministers of the Divine Being, so light and multiple that some would later think them to have wings...

...To teach a text is also to teach a way of reading...