THE LANGUAGE OF MYTH

I'll only speak about my own Tradition for two reasons.

First, I only feel qualified to speak about my own Tradition.

Second, outsiders never catch the nuances of another culture and those who arrogantly and paternalistically take it upon themselves to speak for or about another People, even when they are "well-intentioned", invariably make first class jackasses of themselves.

I should say at the outset too, that the use of the term "myth" in the subject of this post is for the benefit of those who hail from Western cultures, influenced as their cultures are by Norse, Greek and Roman mythology. There is no Hebrew word that translates as 'myth'. When we wish to speak of myth, we use the original term 'mythos', as we've been doing since the first Jew learned to speak Greek.

The closest approximation to 'myth' in the Hebrew tradition is 'midrash', which is both the homiletic interpretation of Torah and allegory.

Midrash is employed in a number of cases. By and large, it is used when an exhaustive expostulation on a subject would require one to wax prolix, as was not the Jewish Sages' style.

It is also, as in the example presented below, employed when an idea was apprehended before the terminology that could express it in non-figurative terms was developed.

The following 'midrash' always bugged me.

It goes like this:

God was angered at the trees in the Garden of Eden because He* commanded them to be fruit trees, but they took it upon themselves to grow as fruit-bearing trees.

*(I use the gender-neutral pronouns 'It' and 'That' to designate God, but I was quoting the midrash.)

The Rabbis explain that it was God's intention that the whole tree be the edible fruit, not just the fruity things on the branches.


It sounded like a lot of primitive nonsense, to be perfectly honest about it.

Then came along a Rabbi and explained the meaning of the midrash, much to my edification, relief and embarrassment at my arrogance and ignorance.

He explained: The midrash speaks of cause and effect. The early stages of creation allowed for the possibility of a world in which there was no cause and effect. Cause and effect are not necessary developments or characteristics of the world. They could have been one and the same. There need not have been any separation or delay between a cause and its effect/s, or for that matter, the inverse, any given effect/s and its/their cause/s. There could have been a world of maximal what we call today "entanglement". Time, forces, differentiation and discrete bodies could either not have formed at all, or formed in different configurations that would not have allowed for cause and effect. There could have been, therefore, a world in which laboriousness and enslavement were impossible. God was angered because the universe developed cause and effect and it did, thus creating the conditions wherein beings could be enslaved.

Creation, we learn from this midrash, was granted a goodly measure of independence and the ability to determine the forms it would take. It took on configurations that would allow for cause and effect, to wit: time, forces, differentiation and discrete entities as we know them.

At the time that the midrash was articulated, the terms 'cause', 'effect', 'differentiation', and 'entanglement', all of those terms I can now employ to make this matter sound rational to those who have to have matters that are super-rational translated to them into rational terms, had not yet been coined.

The Rabbis were able to understand the principles and the phenomena in and of themselves, but they did not yet have the terminology to express it in the way that is accepted nowadays as "rational".

They had presaged what physics is working on by over 2000 years, but they didn't speak like physicists.

So, they explained the matter homiletically, allegorically.

Such is the nature of a lot of myth.

So, my dear fellow denizens of Laputa; the next time you feel a smirk coming on at a myth, remember: it may simply be that you don't understand the phenomenon that is being discussed and that we are not yet in possession of the terminology that will translate the meaning into the words that you accept as rational.

Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel
DoreenDotan@gmail.com