The Man Keeping Us Down

The Man Is Keeping Us Down

Well this week is the second Parasha and I was only most of one behind. Basically I read Bereshit and Noah today. What did I cover? The Garden of Eden and all its fun. A lot of genealogy that no matter how slowly I read doesn't help me at all. (Are the two Enochs the same Enoch and why don't they just move to Enoch?) I watched a brother kill another brother and G-d try to kill us all. My name and two of my friends' names came up and it all ended really with the division of language.

I think G-d is just keeping us down. I might step into why here, we'll see but let's just preview the vicious and possibly pointless smacks down that we got from our deity in this week's round of Bible Catch-up:

There's the whole two trees we can't eat of because they'll make us smart and immortal. This story has a few zingers in it including G-unit suspiciously asking Adam “who told you you were naked?”. G-d's the perv knowing that naked is apparently some sort of ill and letting these two bask in the buff. And then Adam doesn't just blame Eve, it happens but let's cool our anti-misogynistic tendencies to see who Adam blames first. “the woman that YOU put in here with me gave it to me and I ate it.” G-d set us up and knocked us down just so that we, while made in G-d's image, don't actually compete with G-d/whatever vague angelic, heavenly things are also up there (they make giant, super babies with our women too...I'm leaving that alone).

And may I tangentially say that if we were Greeks, the angel guy guarding Eden after the expulsion would have frickin' Nephalim trying to sneak in and steal immortality ALL THE TIME.

Now that I'm reading the Bible in partially Hebrew, I'm reading it a little more. It doesn't explicitly say that Cain's gift is less than Abel's gift. And Cain gives first. Why does G-d dick over Cain? What kind of manners are we learning from our Creator here? Shit ones. If I had that much direct contact with G-d and lived that close to the Garden, and then G-d rebuffs me for no apparent reason, I might go on a killing spree too.

Then some names are listed.....maybe listed again. Who let more than one person write the Bible? And why didn't I notice it on my own?

Noah. Who is actually Noach and I would care about the lack of phlegm but Noah is actually a girl's name. And G-d forbid we give a woman power tools in the Bible....what you mean he didn't have power tools? He built that boat thing without power tools? Good for you Noach. Good for you.

Anyway, we are usually better at listing sins or alluding to sins but in this round of G-d Hates Us And Ties to Destroy Us, G-d is just sad and man is bad. If someone is going to kill us all, I'd like a list of crimes please. I'm beginning to wonder if G-d just didn't like the amount of people we'd made and was getting freaked out and wanted to make sure G-d could still control us.

Babel. I've written about Babel before and about how angry can our Creator be at us working together? Not angry enough to kill us all, which is apparently a change but G-d didn't punish the builders for a sin, G-d punished them for once again, getting to close to heavenly ambitions. Like we were moving to close to G-unit's neighborhood again and this is segregation-land. G-d wants us weak. G-d wants us divided. G-d wants power over us.

Why?

I'm not really sure I'm at a point in my life, my day or my caffeine consumption to tackle that last one. And after all these origin myths while clearly superior to everyone else's because they're ours...are still just primitive origin myths.

And I am constantly aware that this book, these books and stories, are less about how we develop as a people and more how G-d develops as our G-d. And I suppose that if I don't want a G-d image that is 100% douche, I must spin this.

Maybe in order to create a G-d (did I just say it happened the other way around after just reading the story of Creation?) that WAS all powerful, or all good, or even pretty powerful and pretty good, we had to bring our selves down a few pegs. We'd already decided we were more important than plants and animals but we needed to have something like us but more. And maybe we couldn't always find the reason to give this new creature, this new substance, story, character, deity the power over us we eventually would need it to have. Because which is scarier? A tantrum throwing deity that sometimes destroys us because it's scared? Or not having any reason for that destruction at all? So in true Jewish fashion, we started with actions instead of intentions. And as we journey through the Bible that Kavenah grows. And so does G-d.