The Genesis:3 Project
God said: My spirit shall not contend within the human being indefinitely, because he is also flesh; his days shall be 120 years.  (Genesis 6:3)
 
One of my favorite Dave Matthews songs is “Gravedigger.”  (It is worth the listen.)  It is a meditation on death, but also a remarkable insight in how to consider the length of a life.  It begins “Cyrus Jones, 1810-1913, made his great grand-children believe you could live to 103.  A hundred and three is forever when you’re just a little kid.  So, Cyrus Jones lived forever.”
 
Scientists recently speculated that the oldest age a person can reach is 115, notwithstanding the occasional record-breaker.  Our physical bodies, the “also flesh” in the verse above, don’t seem to be able to sustain life beyond that point.  Sure, there will be technological advances that will enable greater longevity, but they will require replacing original manufacturers’ equipment with aftermarket parts.
 
I am past the halfway point of Cyrus Jones, Genesis and scientific evidence, and trying hard to remember what I thought about being old when I was young.  I got a little bit of insight from my two-year-old granddaughter who has just learned to put multiple names to some things.  Entertaining us with her combination of “mommy” and “daddy” with their proper first names, she was then confronted with a new universe of relationships.  Standing there were her grandparents, her great-grandfather and a friend whose name was the same as her mother’s.  As her mom (my daughter) explained that grandma and grandpa were her own mommy and daddy, great-grandpa was grandma’s daddy and the friend had the same name as mommy, this little girl looked on with a combination of skepticism, amusement and incomprehension. We can always tell when she’s on overload because she agrees to anything with a flat, “Yeah.”  She was “yeah-ing” all over the place.
 
I am thinking that some admixture of those qualities informed my sense of being older than 60 when I was five or twelve or twenty-two.  Hey, I knew it would happen and I knew plenty of people who lived in that decade and beyond.  But me?
 
I am not talking about the adolescent self-deception of invincibility set to music in the theme to “Fame.”  It only takes a diagnosis of the first chronic condition fished from the gene pool to disabuse you of that notion.  I mean imagining myself as an old guy, with a wife, grown children and a granddaughter. If you had told me all those things (and the rest of it), I would have been “yeah-ing” all over the place, too.  I mean, I grew up with grandparents and great-grandparents and plenty of older people around, and it was just incomprehensible that I would get there myself.  Like Cyrus Jones, all those people (none of whom made it to 103) lived forever.
 
Yet, here I am.  My great blessing is that my years have been full, so I will not subject you to the self-pity of “it all flew by so fast.”  But now I find myself trying to imagine what I have heard from so many vital people who have come so much closer to the limits of their flesh to sustain them and are tired of the spirit contending within.  Can I imagine proclaiming, “I’m ready?”
 
I cannot.  It is not that I consider that surrender some failure of will or an expression of cowardice before the arrayed forces of mortality.  And it is not that I have some bucket list to check off before I will claim a life fulfilled.  I am just not there yet, and if you tell me I will be, I will answer, “Yeah.”  Until, I hope, 103, 115 or 120. 
 
I am standing with everyone alive on the verge of four very uncertain years ahead.  The prospect of what is to come has provoked within me a combination of skepticism, amusement and incomprehension, along with fear, defiance and determination.  It is hard to imagine what comes next, even if the promise is that I will recognize it “again.”
 
The chorus of Dave Matthews’s song pleads, “Gravedigger, when you dig my grave, can you make it shallow, so that I can feel the rain.”  It is a young man’s request from someone who knows what is coming but simply cannot imagine it except on his own terms.  I hope God’s contentious spirit moves me beyond that stage.  Yeah.

The Genesis:3 Project
 
Adam lived 130 years and fathered [a son] in his likeness, in his image, and he called his name Seth. (Genesis 5:3)
 
Harry Chapin wrote epic story-songs during his short career.  He was 38 when he died in a collision on the Long Island Expressway – a tragedy he probably would have turned into a dramatic melody and emotional lyrics.
 
My favorite Chapin song is “Better Place to Be” about the lonely midnight watchman at Miller Tool and Die who shares the story of an unintentional one-night stand with an equally lonely waitress.  It breaks my heart whenever I listen to it.  But his biggest commercial success was “Cat’s in the Cradle,” the lament of a workaholic father who raises his son with the promise, “I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then.”
 
I had lots of friends who believed that song was written about their own experiences growing up.  And an equal number worried that they would be perceived by their own children as the father in the song.  After all, the son in the song wants to grow up to be just like his father.  And – spoiler alert – he does.
 
Harry Chapin did not invent this dynamic, even if he put it to a melody that is catchier than the cantillation of the Biblical text.  God did it first, and then Adam, the first person created in-my-image-in-my-likeness, repeated it.  Adam had plenty of other children, but here we learn explicitly that at least when this child arrived Adam saw him as some kind of mini-me. 
 
It is not 100% clear to me which child of Adam and Eve was first-born.  Yes, we have the story of Cain and Abel that precedes Seth, but Seth seems to ensure the lineage of his parents, the function of the first-born.  I think it is the conceit of all first-time parents that the baby with whom they have been entrusted will be the best-raised child in all of history: like me, only the better image I have of myself.
 
If my own observations and, I have to admit, experience are any indicator, that conceit falls away sooner or later.  Children turn out “like me,” but not so much better, or they turn out a “better image,” but not quite so much like me.  And that’s as it should be.  The father (or mother) who believes he can improve on himself ought to improve himself.  And if he can’t, then he should not sentence his child to make the same mistakes.
 
My hope is that I taught my father as well as my first-born child taught me.  It took me a lot of years to understand that if I was going to help her fulfill her potential, I could not create the overlay of my expectations.  Fortunately, she was headstrong enough to pursue what she really wanted…and respectful enough to uphold the fifth commandment.  Her siblings had it easier, even if I discovered new mistakes to make with them just so they wouldn’t feel left out.
 
But there are some few people who are raised to be “just like him,” and they set out to repeat that challenge.  They have a sense of their role as creator, mandated to ensure children, or a community, or a society in their likeness, in their image.  They become tyrants, practiced at seduction or coercion (or both) and insistent that the world around them in radiating concentric circles will conform to their ideas.  No matter how good they seem to be at it in the beginning, they wind up in a heap at the end.
 
Seth lived a good long life – more than 900 years – and fathered sons and daughters.  That’s all we know about him.  In fact, that’s all we know about the generations that followed him.  Seth grew up to be just like Adam, and Seth’s sons and their sons and their sons grew up to be just like their fathers before them – as far as we know.  It was not so many generations until the world was enough of a mess that humanity was washed away in a heap.
 
We learn here and at other times in the Biblical prehistory of human society that we progress best when we discover the unique contributions in an infinitely diverse human family, not so much when we reward sameness and imitation.  Yes, we need rules or, like Cain and Abel, it can end equally badly. 
 
Harry Chapin loved irony, and the irony in “Cat’s in the Cradle” is that the father’s cheerful neglect becomes the son’s model of his own behavior.  I got lucky that my kids seemed to tease out my better values from my own cheerful neglect.  But it doesn’t always happen.
 
In the years ahead, we will see if our new American leadership will learn that in-my-image-in-my-likeness is momentarily gratifying, but in the end a huge mistake. And if so, let’s hope it gets learned before the last verse.
CAT’S IN THE CRADLE
 
Adam lived 130 years and fathered [a son] in his likeness, in his image, and he called his name Seth. (Genesis 5:3)
 
Harry Chapin wrote epic story-songs during his short career.  He was 38 when he died in a collision on the Long Island Expressway – a tragedy he probably would have turned into a dramatic melody and emotional lyrics.
 
My favorite Chapin song is “Better Place to Be” about the lonely midnight watchman at Miller Tool and Die who shares the story of an unintentional one-night stand with an equally lonely waitress.  It breaks my heart whenever I listen to it.  But his biggest commercial success was “Cat’s in the Cradle,” the lament of a workaholic father who raises his son with the promise, “I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then.”
 
I had lots of friends who believed that song was written about their own experiences growing up.  And an equal number worried that they would be perceived by their own children as the father in the song.  After all, the son in the song wants to grow up to be just like his father.  And – spoiler alert – he does.
 
Harry Chapin did not invent this dynamic, even if he put it to a melody that is catchier than the cantillation of the Biblical text.  God did it first, and then Adam, the first person created in-my-image-in-my-likeness, repeated it.  Adam had plenty of other children, but here we learn explicitly that at least when this child arrived Adam saw him as some kind of mini-me. 
 
It is not 100% clear to me which child of Adam and Eve was first-born.  Yes, we have the story of Cain and Abel that precedes Seth, but Seth seems to ensure the lineage of his parents, the function of the first-born.  I think it is the conceit of all first-time parents that the baby with whom they have been entrusted will be the best-raised child in all of history: like me, only the better image I have of myself.
 
If my own observations and, I have to admit, experience are any indicator, that conceit falls away sooner or later.  Children turn out “like me,” but not so much better, or they turn out a “better image,” but not quite so much like me.  And that’s as it should be.  The father (or mother) who believes he can improve on himself ought to improve himself.  And if he can’t, then he should not sentence his child to make the same mistakes.
 
My hope is that I taught my father as well as my first-born child taught me.  It took me a lot of years to understand that if I was going to help her fulfill her potential, I could not create the overlay of my expectations.  Fortunately, she was headstrong enough to pursue what she really wanted…and respectful enough to uphold the fifth commandment.  Her siblings had it easier, even if I discovered new mistakes to make with them just so they wouldn’t feel left out.
 
But there are some few people who are raised to be “just like him,” and they set out to repeat that challenge.  They have a sense of their role as creator, mandated to ensure children, or a community, or a society in their likeness, in their image.  They become tyrants, practiced at seduction or coercion (or both) and insistent that the world around them in radiating concentric circles will conform to their ideas.  No matter how good they seem to be at it in the beginning, they wind up in a heap at the end.
 
Seth lived a good long life – more than 900 years – and fathered sons and daughters.  That’s all we know about him.  In fact, that’s all we know about the generations that followed him.  Seth grew up to be just like Adam, and Seth’s sons and their sons and their sons grew up to be just like their fathers before them – as far as we know.  It was not so many generations until the world was enough of a mess that humanity was washed away in a heap.
 
We learn here and at other times in the Biblical prehistory of human society that we progress best when we discover the unique contributions in an infinitely diverse human family, not so much when we reward sameness and imitation.  Yes, we need rules or, like Cain and Abel, it can end equally badly. 
 
Harry Chapin loved irony, and the irony in “Cat’s in the Cradle” is that the father’s cheerful neglect becomes the son’s model of his own behavior.  I got lucky that my kids seemed to tease out my better values from my own cheerful neglect.  But it doesn’t always happen.
 
In the years ahead, we will see if our new American leadership will learn that in-my-image-in-my-likeness is momentarily gratifying, but in the end a huge mistake. And if so, let’s hope it gets learned before the last verse.

The Genesis:3 Project
 
After a time, Cain brought some of the fruit of the ground as an offering to God. (Genesis 4:3)
 
A long time ago, I wrote a humor book called Growing Up Jewish.  I was a little nervous about the title because there was another book of autobiographical stories with the same name.  I loved the original book, but someone had written a humor book called Growing Up Catholic, and so I had no choice.
 
My favorite story in the anthology was by Allan Sherman.  It was an excerpt from his longer autobiography called A Gift of Laughter.  In it, he tells the tale of how he overheard his grandmother, who had a thick Yiddish accent, say she needed a football for a dinner party.  Allan didn’t know why his grandmother needed a football, but he set out to get one from a not-so-friendly neighborhood kid.  He inflated it, polished it with brown shoe polish and put it on the dining room table for his grandma to find. 
 
Instead, his mother found it and started to yell at him for leaving his things out.  He protested that he heard grandma say she needed a football.  Allan’s mother collapsed in laughter.  “Not a football,” she managed to gasp out.  “A fruit bowl.”
 
I won’t tell you the end of the story – Allan Sherman wrote prose as well as he parodied songs, so you should read it in his words.  But this much you need to know: he was devastated. He wanted nothing more than to please his grandmother, and instead he was humiliated, made to feel like an idiot.
 
Don’t be too harsh on Mrs. Sherman – it’s a pretty funny mistake, amplified by the prop.  Thirty years later, reflecting back on it as a successful performer, Allan found a wonderful lesson. But at the time?
 
I’m not one of those people who believes that every kid deserves a trophy just for showing up at practice.  I even believe that there is a value in mistakes, and that discovering that you suck at something makes you humble.  But I don’t believe in crossing the line between educating someone about their error and making them feel worthless.  I can tell you from personal experience that the internal voices we carry do a perfectly adequate job of making us feel worthless.
 
I imagine Cain, a member of the very first generation of children, looking for some way to please GrandGod, his parents’ creator.  He made an offering – actually, the word is closer to “gift” than to “sacrifice” – of something he grew.  You imagine what it was; maybe he picked some of those late-season zucchinis or the tomatoes that were about to burst or little green apples that gave him a stomach ache.  Maybe the gift made no sense, even in the hazy world where God seemed to show up for conversations with some regularity.
 
The effort was earnest, but the offering was all wrong.  Cain projected onto God what Cain himself valued, but not so much that he gave up the choice fruits or the stuff he wanted for himself. 
 
It was a great idea, after all.  Cain invented gift-giving, the way we show our appreciation of those we care about.  And as we head into the season of compulsory extravagance, it is worth thinking about whether the gifts we give are what others really want or what we decide they want.
 
That’s when we are Cain.  But just as often, we are on the receiving end of those gifts.  What do we do when we are presented with someone else’s idea of what we want?  Most of us know how to be polite.  Some of us are well-practiced at being effusive. A few of us carefully regift.  But the point of the offering is not the gift itself.  It is the act of giving.
 
That’s what Allan Sherman’s mother did not, in the moment, realize.  That seems to be what God had yet to learn about the impulses of these human creations.  As selfish as we can be as human beings, every now and then we are overwhelmed with the need to share something we value with someone we value more.
 
Happy shopping.  Happy giving. Happier receiving.

The Genesis:3 Project

But God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor touch it, or you shall die.”  Genesis 3:3

One of my personal flaws, which I worked very hard to correct, is a tendency to exaggerate.  Mostly, it takes the form of harmless but completely unnecessary overstatements of fact.  For example, if I waited in a line for 10 minutes, I might report it after the fact as close to half an hour.  Nonsense, purposeless, ridiculous.  Even as I say such a thing, I am thinking, “What’s the matter with you?  And what difference does it make?”

I pretty much overcame this verbal tic a long time ago, but I was reminded of it when I considered Eve’s response to the serpent in the Garden.  The cunning snake, who seems to have had legs at this moment, purposely under-reports God’s instructions as he tries to persuade the woman to eat the forbidden fruit.  “Didn’t God say you could eat from ANY tree in the Garden?” he asks.

Well, yes God did, as a matter of fact.  God said those words exactly, but the snake lopped off the exception that made all the difference: that one tree.

Why didn’t Eve just call out the snake on the deception?  “Nice try, buddy.  You know there was more to it than that!”  Instead, she elaborates, annotates, exaggerates.  She reports that she may not eat it “nor touch it.”  God never said “touch.”

What Eve does prefigures the challenging proclivity of religious traditions to attempt to out-pious each other.  In Jewish tradition, this proclivity is itself defended in pious terms.  Sometimes it is defended with the phrase “build a fence around the Torah.”  The practice heaps extra requirements and observances on simple instructions.  Anyone who observes kashrut, the dietary laws, knows that fence around the simple instruction “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” (Exodus 23:19 and other places) includes the complete separation of all kinds of meat from all kinds of dairy, as well as a thousand-year argument about how many hours to wait between eating meat and dairy.

Sometimes it is defended with the phrase “beyond the letter of the law.”  The practice sets up the expectation, if not the requirement, that if you were really serious about the observance, you wouldn’t settle for the bare minimum.  Take the example of Rabbi Yochanan, the third-century sage, who blamed the entire collapse of Jerusalem 150 years earlier on a population that ONLY observed the letter of the law and would not go beyond.

These tendencies are not all bad, mind you.  To set a minimum standard of interpersonal compassion may allow some people to feel good about not helping some who are in need.  And my entire profession – the rabbinate – relies on the construction, repair and repositioning of fences.
But here’s what is really wrong with what Eve does: when the exaggeration proves false, the truth becomes suspect.  And when the exaggerations compete – do I wait 1, 3 or 6 hours for ice cream after a burger? – the essential truths are perceived as relative and matters of personal preference.  The fence that protects the fence is not protecting the Torah. 

And when going beyond the letter of the law becomes an expectation rather than a (commendable) choice, the rule itself is supplanted and integrity is placed beyond reach.

And here’s the thing – sooner or later, you get found out.  Fact-checking is not a recent occupation.  Anyone who read chapter 2 before chapter 3 knows that Eve made something up.  Caught up in her own completely unnecessary overstatement of fact, she either must brazen it out (and be proved wrong) or own up to the deception. 

Faced with a snake, now a legless metaphor, too many religions and other belief systems are unwilling to trust the truth of their values as sufficient to withstand the doubter, scoffer or antagonist.  Out of such ironic lack of faith in their faith, and perhaps with the best of intentions, the defenders of the faith build fences and move the lines that make faith all the more difficult. (That’s a lot of “faith” in one sentence!)

I don’t want to be guilty of exaggeration again.  Not every fence is gratuitous and not every venture beyond the requirement is hyperbolic.  In fact, so much of what is familiar about Jewish tradition exists in the human expansions of the divine instruction.  I may object to excess, but I am not a minimalist.
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And the same is true for America.  We have just been through an exhausting year of campaigning and now we are waiting to discover if fences and walls are about to be erected and how far beyond the letter of the law we intend to go.  The truth, I believe, stands on its own.  Don’t fear the snake.

The Genesis:3 Project

God blessed the seventh day and made it holy. (Genesis 2:3)

When I retired from my pulpit of 27 years, my family prepared a surprise for me.  They solicited from members of the congregation remembrances of a sermon or teaching of mine that had made an impression on them.  They bound them in a book and presented me with a few copies.  One is a little tear-stained…

Having the opportunity to look back and reflect on my accomplishments felt like a real luxury.  I had moved pretty rapidly from one work situation to another with very little formal transition.  My life’s work (to that point) had been in the synagogue.  When I made the decision to change directions, it would have been appropriate to take time to reflect.  But there was no such time, and neglecting that opportunity took its toll.

How remarkable that all my years observing Shabbat did not translate to the “big picture” of my life.  When the “big work” of creation ended, God took the time to do two things: bless the work and make it holy.

There were all of two people in the world at the time, and they were both unemployed. They could eat anything growing, they didn’t need clothes and, like my city, there was no FIOS service to install.  That seventh day of rest for God was irrelevant for the earthlings.  They had seven days of rest every week (well, until the unauthorized fruit).

God blessed the day and God made the day holy.  That is, God imbued the day with meaning and set it aside as distinct. Later Jewish tradition would make those acts all about us; we make and receive special blessings on Shabbat and we sanctify the day with wine and meals and song and sometimes a little fruitful-and-multiplying.  But in the beginning (here in chapter 2), the seventh day is not for the children of that original couple.  It is for God.

After all, what did God do, according to the Torah, just before that seventh day?  God looked at everything that had been created in that flurry of pronouncements and, hey, it was very good!  So God took the moment/the day to acknowledge that the work completed was more than just a task.  It had significance.  It was transformative.  It was for a blessing.  And though another Day One would come around after the seventh day, that moment/day of transition was separate and distinct from the days before and the days to come.  It was holy.

Shabbat, it seems, was gifted to people but created for God.  Far be it for me to suggest that God actually needed the day of rest (unlike me), but God desired to acknowledge that the work was not incidental or negligible.  Becoming aware is a benediction.  Satisfaction sanctifies.

If you are ritually oriented in a faith, you do a bunch of blessing and you are familiar with things made holy.  I suspect that, like me, you think you know what blessing and sanctifying are all about.  If you find your spiritual life an internal process, you likely spend little time on blessing and sanctifying – too old-school and without a real reference point.

Let me encourage you to take a lesson from God (even if you are a non-believer; suspend your disbelief for a minute).  What each of us accomplishes has worth.  Take the time when a task or a project or a career comes to fruition to look at everything you did in your flurry of activity and notice just how good it is.  Become aware of what you have done, and in doing so, give it the meaning it deserves and you deserve.  Allow the satisfaction you take in completion – whether you have “succeeded” or simply safely reached the end of the endeavor – to stand distinct and separate, that is, holy from the efforts yet ahead.  Becoming aware is benediction.  Satisfaction sanctifies.

I don’t know how I would have blessed my time as a congregational rabbi and made it holy if I had not been blessed and made holy by my loving family and the friends they invited to contribute.  Despite my weekly Shabbat, I wouldn’t have made my “seventh day.”

The semester’s end is ahead.  That long-term project’s conclusion is on the horizon.  You are about to leave your job, or retire, or get promoted.  A child is due in your life or soon to go off independently.
The campaign season ends with the election.
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Bless the moment.  Make it holy.