How Do You Doo? (a midrash)
Gellman, Marc
HOW DO YOU DOO? A midrash about Adam and Amram in the Garden of Eden MARC GELLMAN Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is...
...Not many people know this, but, before Eve showed up, Adam's best friend in the Garden of Eden was a donkey named Amram...
...Adam and all the day and night animals liked the idea of Shabbat...
...God told them that if all they did was work and work and work all the time with no resting, they would all look like the rotten fruit and broken branches Adam and Amram shlepped off every day...
...By the morning of the sixth day, to tell you the truth, even Adam and Amram would have rather stayed asleep than listen to the rooster...
...No luck...
...Still, it was work and it made Adam tired...
...Adam and Amram had another thing in common that made them friends...
...They were all tired and sore and enjoying a good night's rest when, just as the first rays of morning light were creeping across the garden, the rooster started crowing, "Cock-a-doodle...
...Amram helped Adam do his work in the garden, which is also something not many people know...
...Genesis 2:15) Now the work in the Garden of Eden was not that bad...
...God even helped Adam and Amram celebrate Shabbat...
...The Garden of Eden was clean as a whistle...
...God then told the animals about Shabbat and about resting and about making the seventh day special and holy...
...Gellman is a moment contributing editor and rabbi of Temple Beth Torah in Dix Hills, New York...
...Another thing not many people know is that in those days roosters only knew cock-a-doodle...
...coconuts...
...By the fifth day of the first week, to tell you the truth, even Adam and Amram were really tired from their work...
...Mostly, rotten fruit and broken branches had to be shlepped away to a place near the edge of the garden where God knows what happened to them...
...It started on the first morning after the first day when every living thing had been created by God...
...On that day in the garden, not a single piece of fruit turned rotten, and not a single broken branch fell to the ground...
...Roosters are pretty dumb, and they didn't learn cock-a-doodle-doo until years later...
...Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God: you shall not do any work— you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements...
...God's shhhhhhhh...
...Genesis 20:8-10 Why did God give Shab-bat to the animals...
...Some night animals would follow, hoping that Adam and Amram would lead them to the rooster so that they could wring his neck and stop his cock-a-doodle forever...
...Every morning of that first week, Adam and Amram would wait for the rooster's cock-a-doodle, and then start shlepping the rotten fruit and broken branches to the rotten fruit and broken branches place at the edge of the garden...
...Resting was just as important as working, God told them, and that was one of the things God made Shabbat to teach...
...they liked it a lot...
...But the night animals were still confused because they always rested during the day, so God told them that Shabbat would begin Friday night, not Saturday morning, so that they could have some rest too...
...There was nothing to do except sit around and rest and listen to the rooster of the Garden of Eden cock-a-doodle in the middle of the afternoon...
...They think that life in the Garden of Eden was just one big party with a lot of bananas and Marc Gellman's midrashim for children appear frequently in these pages...
...from God...
...So he was happy to have a friend...
...They were the only two living things who liked the rooster in the Garden of Eden...
...even woke up Adam and Amram and the rooster, who were very surprised to be asleep so late in the morning...
...Adam and Amram would hide the rooster every morning and let him sleep next to them every night...
...Not so...
...Early in the morning of the seventh day the night animals were settling down for a good day's sleep and waiting for the terrible rooster cock-a-doodle, but none came...
...God put Adam in the garden "to till it and to tend it...
...The morning of the seventh day came and went—and no sound from the rooster...
...This was their chance to finish him off, they thought, and so they sneaked up quietly, as only night animals know how to do, and just as they were ready to pounce, they all heard a great big " SHHHHHHHH...
...Anyway Adam and Amram loved the sound of the rooster, but all the other animals wanted to wring his neck, especially the night animals like the owl, opossum, bat and raccoon, who were up all night and really needed their sleep...
...The most recent, "Noah's Friends," was in May 1983...
...The night animals were thrilled because they figured he was dead, but when they looked around they saw him asleep between Adam and Amram, who were also asleep...
Vol. 8 • July 1984 • No. 7
