On Dust...

Howard's notes from August 9th:

Genesis 3:19, "sweat of your brow" - this refers to man's labor that lasts until death. How ironic! Man was originally a divine creature, but see what happens if you disobey. Another irony: in previous verses, men rule over women; now, work rules man. As Leon Kass puts in in his The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis , man's labor is for a lifetime while women's labor is only in childbirth.

Aryeh Kaplan's view (in his commentary to Genesis 2:17-18) is that reproduction and mortality are linked.

3:19, "dust" as a theme appears many times in the bible and ritual.

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• Ash Wednesday - a reminder of human mortality and the body's perishability
• Jonah 3 - at Nineveh, the king sat with ashes as a way of repenting
• Job 2:8 - he sat in ashes for boils...
• Job [end of book] - he can't understand God because he is merely "dust and ashes."
• Psalm 103:14 - said at Yiskor service: man's ashes and God's presence...
• In these contexts, "ashes" refers to a crumbling of the physical body, not the residue of burning. "Dust" is the earth to which we return on physical death.
• Ecclesiastes
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• verse 3 - man's physical fate is the same as for animals: return to the ground
• verse 9 - It's better to be alive than dead; when dead, you're nothing. In life, you are aware of impending death. Therefore, enjoy life with all your might, especially the simple things that give pleasure.
• [end of book] - a verse that is said the the burial service; the spirit survives although the body dies

Notions about afterlife are post-biblical. Provisions about returning to "dust" appear to be a deliberate way to distance the Jews from Egyptian ritual and practice that was designed to prevent returning to dust, i.e., mummification.

3:20 - the woman gets a name [it's about time!] following verses about death. According to Leon Kass, hope springs from death as the creation of new life so that "Eve" is seen in a new light. The name "Eve" [Chava in Hebrew, related to Chai, life] is not derived from man (eesh to eeshah)

Yehuda Amachai's A Child is Something Else - we launch a child like a rocket to the future, to places you [parents] never will see.

A Child Is Something Else Again
By Yehuda Amichai

A child is something else again. wakes up
in the afternoon and in an instant he's full of words,
in an instant he's humming, in an instant warm,
instant light, instant darkness.

A child is Job. They've already placed their bets on him
but he doesn't know it. He scratches his body for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet.
They're training him to be a polite Job,
to say 'thank you' when the lord has given,
to say 'you're welcome' when the lord has taken away.

A child is vengeance.
A child is a missile into the coming generations.
I launched him: I'm still trembling.

A child is something else again: on rainy spring day
glimpsing the garden of Eden through the fence,
kissing him in his sleep,
hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles.
A child delivers you from death.
Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.

Kass on children - parents' desire for a better life for children is the engine to sanctify life; this also applies to a better life for all children in the world.

Only humans recognize their mortality...

Adam's body is punished for making a bad choice, but his soul is unaffected.

Cremation - Rabbi Marder's source is from www.chabad.org, article by Naftali Silberberg - Reasons for not being cremated include the reverence for the body and memory of the Holocaust. Burning is a deliberate destruction of the body; the Nazis did this. Usually, ashes from cremation cannot be buried in Jewish cemetery. However, if the cremation was done against the will of the deceased or the deceased was misinformed about cremation, the ashes can be buried.